| I actually really like the pavilion. It is a great space to go and sit with a cup of coffee (from the Rice Coffeehouse, not Dirk's, of course) and read a book and enjoy the natural light. The landscaping around it is gorgeous. I also really like the idea of reinvigorating the central quad as a hotbed of campus activity. Tikimoof complains about getting rid of the lovely lawns, but the lawns that it took over were generally muddy and unusable. There is still a very large green space immediately behind the pavilion, and it's in much better shape than it was before. The paths are not the same as the rest of campus; they're kind of an updated version. They fit in with the campus aesthetic, but they look cleaner and more modern.
A lot of people say that everyone will think the pavilion is ugly 10 years from now, but I don't think it's fair to judge a building from what it will be in a decade. Modern architecture succeeds when it can be seen as a relic of its era; it fails when it just looks out-of-place. Hopefully the pavilion will be the former.
Why are Rice students so given to loud complaining? People complain about the current student rec center, and how we need a new one, but then they complain when the trustees are nice enough to give us a brand-new, state-of-the-art, shiny rec center with an outdoor olympic-sized swimming pool and all sorts of other great amenities. They complain that we don't have many great meeting spaces outside of the colleges, and they complain when we get a pavilion specifically designed for that purpose in the dead center of campus. |