It is with a certain pride that I see buildings going up all over the Texas Tech campus. With pride mixed with regret.
Why regret? Not just nostalgia for the way it used to be, but for the increasing lack of open spaces on campus.
What makes a melody beautiful? Sure tone is involved, but so is ... silence. One can argue that good music is good because of the uses made of periods of silence. Certainly continuous sound is merely ... noise.
So it is with architecture. Buildings are not seen alone, all by themselves, as though they are drifting in a cloud. They are part and parcel of their surroundings. The beauty, the impressiveness of a building, depends on the surrounding spaces that set it off.
Texas Tech is becoming an ugly, crowded campus, a ghetto of buildings that set off by themselves would be pretty but all stacked together are like a dozen symphonies played all at the same time-- noise.
The most precious commodity is space.
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