OGGB

Re: Sturm and Turner's "Built Pedagogy; the University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace"

I recall in 2010 as a fledglingly timid first year student, I came upon OGGB and witnessed the "thing"ness of it, exemplary "built pedagogy" in that it was the newest, as far as I knew, building on campus, and inside the "bunker"-like structure that held up so much glass that I may have thought it was bulletproof or at least idiot-proof, university stuff happened. Did I belong in such a building? Was I worthy? I like Sturm and Turner's likening of the inside of the building to a hotel or airport – chairs are black, floor is shade of grey, the couches are black, the columns that hold the building up from underneath are black, the carpark underneath the building is grey. Uniformity. Not only is the design expansive and space-occupying, it is also space-defining in that it permits the bipedals inside it to feel that they are in a managed space that is clean and therefore whatever happenings occur are to be infused with the same cleanliness, uniformity, and I would say, an 'office' seriousness. The elevator talks to you if you want to go up to the top of the building where the postgraduates and professoral people impart importance (pardon my sarcasm), but you can't take the stairs from the inside, due to a lack thereof. The architects, as Stephen or Sean mentioned in lecture-time, designed it so that knowledge disseminated from the top and wasn't as accessible to the student body. Of course, on the ground floor, you can see through, but it is as if the windows are, as the reading points out, surfaces, and happenings, students moving about as they would in an atrium of an airport or hotel or conference centre, carrying portfolios or assignments or laughing over coffee, are projected through to the outside. This is student life, moving about under the Stalinistic gaze of the enpainted enthroned Owen G. Glenn who funded enough of the concept to have himself oversee, or rather, seen to be overseeing so that students feel looked after. The students are under surveillance, if not from security cameras, or from Owen's eyes, then from the architecture which wordlessly (but shadely) instructs them on how to go about their 'business'. Looking outside from within, one can see the concrete grey of the Fisher and Paykel Building, and of course the flat green grass of the John Hood Plaza. At least there is some naturalness, even if its mowed down and encircled just like the myriad of potplants inside (I am still calling it naturalness because it's living, even though putting a flower no longer is really 'natural'). Come to think of it, it's not a far cry to say that students are in the same position as the plants – enclosed by walls, cut off from the top so as to control their growth, and towered over by the immensity of seriousness that the building embuildings.