Students’ residence St. Edward’s

By Raymund Ryan - 7 January 2010

St. Edward’s University is visible from the highway that links Austin-Bergstrom International Airport with the Texas State Capitol and the scatter of towers that mark Downtown Austin. The university occupies a crest in Austin’s natural topography and is identifiable by its red roofs and by the yellow masonry walls that appear to grow from the ground. As with many colleges in America there is a peculiar if not artificial homogeneity about the place. Then you notice the four-story edifice to the east of campus, a monolith with slit windows and chamfered flanks. As you approach, swatches of red reveal themselves to be glazed inner walls. The structure is in fact several buildings organized about a chasm-like patio skinned in slim and sheer glass panels.
These panels bring an unexpected sensory elegance to St. Edward’s. The building mass bifurcates along the east/west axis, framing a view from suburban-type housing, in the east, to the original administration building - with its Texas Romanesque tower and ersatz rose windows - at the center of campus. To the north, pedestrians access the glazed inner sanctum of the new complex beneath an inhabited bridge linking two of the built quadrants. To the south, a knight’s-move in plan allows for casual strolling through the bowels of the project, past dining facilities, to a campus road and a garage designed, like this fractured monolith with its almost iridescent inner lining, by the young Chilean architect, Alejandro Aravena.
Aravena’s brief was to house 300 students and such subsidiary program as cafeteria, social spaces, laundry and computer rooms. Whereas in the 1950s and ’60s, dormitories were among the notable achievements of American campus architecture (from Aalto’s serpentine Baker House, overlooking the Charles River at MIT, to Moore and Turnbull’s charming communal street for Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz), in recent decades colleges have tended to favor a conservative esthetic, often attempting to...