the diana center, or, i may not get architecture but maybe the light is enough

There's something going on at Barnard today, though I've no idea what. There are balloons and lawn chairs and tables skirted in hula grass.

I was wondering if it has to do with the Diana Center (at one point known as the Nexus, but apparently Barnard thought better of rhyming with Lexus and emulating a little too closely the Matrix. I think this is a good thing, though I find 'The Diana Center' equally as silly -- oh for the good old days of simple, solid, unpretentious names like Milbank and Sulzberger and Hewitt and Reid), for no other reason than that I was on the M4 passing the Diana when I saw the balloons.

I have not been overly impressed with the Diana Center as of yet, mostly because I wanted something soaring, a little more akin to what Columbia is in the process of building directly across the street* from the poor hulking Diana. But I have not been inside it yet, and I know rationally that it is a huge improvement over the old McIntosh Student Center (a waste of space if ever there was one, but a veritable playground for a little girl, with its tiled echoing spaces and purple neon twining around the circular stairway and the bowling alley and potted trees and parading college girls).

And Nick pointed out the other day, in the middle of one of my tirades about its ridiculous nomenclature and its disappointing orange hue and its relative squatness, that the afternoon light it throws on to the lawn outside the Barnard Library is kind of pretty, the sunshine spilling across the grass all angular and sharp through the Diana's oblong panes of glass.

I would like to see that sunlight, and the glowing windows of the Diana in the gloaming hour, and should probably do so before further casting judgment.

*Though Columbia's new science building, aka the Northwest Corner Building, also leaves a lot to desired (bulkiness, boxiness, ugliness, no connection to the street creating yet another dead block), it also has a certain austere and shining elegance, a certain grandiosity, at least when approaching it from the north, coming up the hill from Harlem.