A guide to Cal Poly's architecture

Congratulations on your recent admission to the Cal Poly School of Architecture, and thereby the most grueling years of your life! Don’t worry, many architecture students lead productive social lives within the heavily monitored cages of their workshops! But don’t let fear of impending insomnia worry you out of slumber; keep in mind that you’ll be learning the trade from some of the most structurally sound folks from the industry! Get it? I made an architecture pun! Ha ha ha!

Here at Cal Poly, our motto is “Learn By Reading Textbooks, dah, I mean, Doing,” and as any architecture student can see, simply walking through our lovely campus is an opportunity to expand the foundations of one’s mind! OK, I’ll begrudgingly dispose of the architecture puns. The incredible yet mind-boggling architecture of our university is a wonderland of conflicting ideas and limited funding, an inspiring mix if I may say so myself. Permit me to draw out a blueprint of some of Cal Poly’s finest architecture marvels:

Bldg. 47 – Faculty Offices North

Called “The Maze” by the few who have survived its perils, this building serves as both offices for College of Liberal Arts faculty and a high security prison, for those who enter may simply never return.

According to the original building proposal, the original idea was “M. C. Escher On Slightly More Acid Than He Was Back In The ’50s.” The architect certainly met this goal, with hallways that lead to dead ends and stairwells that lead to the level you were previously on, and I’m pretty sure there’s a portal to Narnia tucked in a corner somewhere.

Some faculty members who have the misfortune of occupying an office in “The Maze” have resorted to flinging their MacBooks at their window simply to create an exit. Others resort to a large bottle of scotch hidden behind their waste bins.

Ultimately the building defies all logic, which may explain why the College of Liberal Arts takes up shop there, for only they have minds creative enough to find pathways in and out of this black hole. Nevertheless, this building is a treasure to Cal Poly, in that it is a miracle that such a building ever was constructed in the first place.

Bldg. 35 – Robert E. Kennedy Library

The second stop on our tour is the Cal Poly Library (“Voted No. 1 Place To Study By Default Because We’re The Only Library On Campus!”), a hulking monolith of concrete that wouldn’t be out of place on Easter Island.

Webster’s Dictionary defines concrete as “the ugliest building material on the face of the planet.” However, back in the ’70s, drugs had been popularized by M. C. Escher, and people were too high to object to the concrete horrors being raised in place of, well, edifices that look nice.

The building has a claim to fame as being the tallest in San Luis Obispo, but most city representatives will tell you “don’t bother going to see it, just enjoy that tidbit of trivia.” The library does its raw function – storage of outdated books – very well, and its cold exterior and jagged edges promote a feeling of Renaissance intellectualism, just minus the Renaissance part.

Bldg. 52 – Science

Our third display is the “Spider Building,” a sprawling web of interconnected corridors that plays host to many of the school’s chemistry laboratories, lower-division physics laboratories, and whatever English class needed a lecture room.

While not quite the maze as “The Maze,” the Spider Building is the bane to many a new student, as simply deciphering the location of the individual wings within the building will result in the student arriving several days late, emaciated, and bag-eyed to their first lecture of the quarter.

The building is also ridiculously old, having been built by the same people who erected Stonehenge. As a result, the building will be torn down to be replaced by a newer structure filled with all sorts of technological gizmos, labs and toilets with bidets.

Construction is estimated to be completed within the next 58 years.

There are many more wonderfully mind-bending structures on the Cal Poly campus, but I encourage you, recently-admitted architecture student, to discover them yourself. One of the reasons Cal Poly is such a fantastic school is not because of our innovations in building design, but our numerous examples of what an architect should never even think of creating.

So when you’re starving for inspiration, locked within your architecture workshop at the end of the quarter with only maggoty bread left to eat and an excrement bucket tucked in the corner of the room, don’t count on getting any from this campus. I sincerely hope you enjoyed these schematics of Cal Poly’s architecture! (Sorry, I just enjoy a good pun.)

James Koman is a biology junior and a Mustang Daily humor columnist.