Something that always strikes me when reading posts like this is how different everyone's tastes are! I've seen people critize what I looked for and laud praises on what I hated. Personally, I LOVE red brick, so I was in love with UVa, Wake Forest, and Vanderbilt. Gothic can be beautiful, too, though often it becomes somewhat depressing. The Gothic part of Duke's campus was quite nice...the rest of it was boring. What irritates me, personally, is when the architecture doesn't match. I wanted each building at my college to look more or less the same, to share a common architecture theme--I wanted it to be clearly indentifiable as a part of the college. NOTHING irritating me more than Berkeley's complete and total inability to stick to any one particular style of architecture. Walking through the Berkeley campus was like a walk through a museum of architecture through the ages, through some beautiful spanish-influenced stone buildings right on up to the most hideously concieved modern architecture you can imagine. :/
This is part of the reason I love UVA so much! All of the building MATCH. They aren't all identical, but they quite nearly all share similar properties of red brick, white accents, and lots of grass and magnolia trees and flowers. Simply breathtaking and absolutely perfect, IMO. Even the brand-spankin'-new John Paul Jones arena matches--none of that crappy modern architecture, built to fit in. Ah, so wonderful, I love UVA.
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