Ezra and Morse have also aged well, neither "looks stupid", and both were modern when built.

Anyway, the new colleges are certainly beautiful. I'm sure they will age well. But, it is slightly disappointing that few architectural/stylistic risks were taken in the design.

In another 1000 year would steel "contemporary" buildings be considered beautiful or not? Is beauty a requirement for a institution? Do you want a building to be beautiful or functional? Who gets to decide what is beautiful?

>Who gets to decide what is beautiful?

If one of the goals of a building is for people to visit it and to spend time around it and to enjoy the experience, then the community of people who will have to live with the building should have the most say about what is beautiful for them. One issue with some architects is that they don't have "skin in the game" when it comes to the buildings they design. They can come up with interesting concepts and visions that may seem appealing as a model or impressive to their peers, but if they don't have to walk by it every single day, then their opinions about what is beautiful should not be a dominating and overriding factor.

In the specific case of university donors, they have a particular vision for what the aesthetics should be, and it's their support that makes the university continue to run well and it's their personal connection to the university that makes them care. Their objectives of beauty should be more important in that particular case than a designer who will be moving on to the next project.

So "modern" and functionalism is great, but I'd rather they figure out something lasting before they experiment with a few $100M of my taxes/tuition/donation.

> Is beauty a requirement for a institution?

It certainly is if those institutions recognize their responsibility when building large projects. Good architecture should be beautiful, robust, and useful. That's a rule of thumb dating back to antiquity. Modernist ideology started to subvert two of those, and really only focused on use. It bastardized beauty into branding, the idea that a building is a sculpture that needs to project the brand of the institution. That's why so called "forward thinking" institutions build buildings that look futuristic. But they only look futuristic in the present-day, that kick wears off really quick. What remains is often objectively horrible and unpleasant. That new Yale building will not suffer that fate, because Yale didn't fall in that trap of using architecture as branding.

(New and improved!)

Or here? https://jenpearl.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/web-stanford-li...

(er, edited non-rotating link)

I've been in a lot of garish, modern/brutal and cold libraries. Some with A/C that actually worked but was always out of control - for whatever reason, a lot of very "modern" buildings have crazy bad HVAC. Either too much or too litle.

Of course that can be fixed, but why not something like an updated version of the latter library?

Alexander talks about the timelessness and beauty of buildings in terms of culturally-defined patterns—almost ‘design patterns’ but a bit more abstract—that are applied and repeated to create buildings and spaces that evoke a particular “feeling without a name”: something we all feel when a building feels alive and congruous with the actions that take place there. A beautiful building is symbiotic with its purpose, its surroundings, and the people who use it.

That’s sort of a gross oversimplification though. I really recommend checking it out. Though its focus is loosely on architecture, I’ve seen a lot of engineers and designers get excited about it and find applications to their own work.

  Do you want a building to be beautiful or functional?

I mean, you can choose which elements of old buildings to copy and which not to copy; you can copy brickwork, window design and courtyard layouts without copying poor disabled access, ineffective climate control or impractical staircase layout.

My school had a mix of classic brick buildings as well as steel and glass. I preferred the steel buildings mainly because they were better-maintained and they let in a lot more natural light.