The new hockey arena, known as the Compton Family Center, is currently under construction south of the Joyce Center. In visiting the site the other day and studying the renderings and photographs on the university architect’s website, one word immediately leaps to mind: typical.
Typical is not necessarily pejorative. A typical building is a practical building – a prudential use of resources. The systems employed are tested and true, the user experience is predictable and controllable. When constructing an arena which must accommodate large crowds and complex mechanical chilling equipment for a consistent ice surface, these qualities become extremely important.
The requirement-driven nature of this project is neatly summarized by the university architect: “…a new, on-campus, two-rink ice facility designed to help meet the needs of the campus and regional community and the Notre Dame hockey program. The main arena, with its traditional [oh that word!] barrel vaulted roof supported by a series of bow trusses will have a capacity of approximately 5,000 patrons (seated and standing room combined) on two levels.” The requirements of this project, however, are not limited to the merely physical. It is also responsible for carrying a significant amount of symbolic baggage.
In my last article, I discussed one way in which this baggage can affect a new building in a negative way. This occurs when a building is overshadowed by external concerns beyond its control. Yet a building can also contribute to an external program, and in this way employ its symbolic presence in the service of a greater whole. In this case, that whole is Notre Dame athletics and the image of the university at large.
As I recall, when this project was first launched the university publicly stated that it would, a priori, be “of a neo-gothic style.” This has not, in my opinion, been fully borne out. It has not been developed on a technical level because the university’s rationale for a neo-gothic style did not arise out of any technical preference for the neo-gothic per se, but rather an obsessive and all-consuming focus on brand identity. That is to say, we do not design buildings to look good, we design them to look right – where right implies a certain consonance with a received image of what constitutes the university.
And so, more than anything the arena intrinsically embodies, it echoes the rhythm of the Purcell Pavilion opposite. Note that that pavilion is itself a rebranding of the Joyce Center to bring it into conformity with the very nexus of athletic sacrality, Notre Dame Stadium. To purists, this mania for appearances is problematic. To Notre Dame, it is a trope.
By this, I mean that the university is, and has for so long, been concerned with its image to such an extent that our concern itself has become a part of that image. Whenever we collectively grieve, celebrate, or construct, our first thought is always to how the endeavor squares with the “identity of Notre Dame.” This is why the rendering of the proposed interior for the Compton Family Center shows a panoply of identical banners, emblazoned simply with the word “Tradition.” Obviously, this monoverbal mantra was done for the expedience of rendering, but in a telling case of life imitating art, it is strangely believable. If any entity has perfected the commoditization of tradition, surely it is the University of Notre Dame.
This commoditization, not to put too fine a point on it, is the defining hallmark of post-industrial culture. A good example of this is in the construction of Olympic stadiums. Those who closely follow the bids of candidate cities categorize infrastructure proposals as temporary, permanent, or legacy. The Beijing “Bird’s Nest” was meant to be a new, permanent symbol of China’s arrival on the global stage (its subsequent disuse notwithstanding). It is an industrial, nationalist building, not a consumer-driven, commodity building. London 2012’s use of Wimbledon for tennis functions is a legacy approach – a bit of a hybrid. American bids, like Chicago 2016, tend to fall on the commoditized side, designing temporary containers for an ephemeral event.
If taken as signals of how socio-economically advanced a culture is, Notre Dame wins the grand prize: building new, permanent structures to commoditize its legacy. Now, considered purely in terms of intent, this not a particularly noble goal. But in its effective output, the Notre Dame approach is virtually indistinguishable from that of Ruskin. Remember Summerson’s observation that “the art of architecture is the art of building ancient monuments; or rather, of building structures which after several hundred years of exposure will be received as such by an unknown generation of men.”
Such is the great irony and paradox of post-industrial construction: when, for ignoble cause, we inadvertently return to the bosom of the ancient and eternal truth. And then we turn around and sell it.
Matthew Balkey is a fourth-year architecture student. He loves traditions, especially when they involve food. He may be reached at mbalkey@nd.edu.
