By TSL Staff
| Editorial
| From the Editors
| October 30, 2009
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Forget the new dorm construction pit, CMC’s mammoth crane, or even Oldenborg’s hideous stucco façade: The new ugliest sight on campus is Frary fountain. The huge Grecian urn that used to be topped off with a simple waterspout is now burdened with a hideous copper ball spewing little streams of water in random directions. Maybe there was no money in the budget to hire a competent landscape architect to consult, but surely someone in the administration or in the art department had the aesthetic sensibilities to avoid such an hideous mixture of modernism and neoclassicism. Both are beautiful on their own, but please: Pick one or the other. Mies van der Rohe would be ashamed of the blasphemy.
The oddly Sputnik-like orb floating above the surface of the water has now overshadowed the wide, rustic urn that used to be the focal point of the entire fountain. Observers’ eyes are immediately drawn away from the monumental base and up towards the orb, resulting in a completely unbalanced focus and making both the orb and the urn feel out of place. What used to look like a single visual unit is now broken into two distinctly unbalanced pieces.
Anyone who ate outside at Frank remembers the pitifully corroded copper pipe that passed as an excuse for a fountain. The sounds of babbling (or more likely dribbling) water gave that little extra touch to the already stellar South Campus dining experience. Upperclassmen wanting a taste of the aesthetic abomination associated with the Frank experience no longer have to travel all the way to South Campus: they can just pay a visit to Frary fountain.
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