Q&A with architect Stephen Clipp on UL’s appearance

UNC is known for its beautiful campus. According to a Forbes article published in 2011, UNC is ranked as having one of the top 15 campuses in the nation. On a daily basis, hundreds flock to the Old Well to snap pictures of the photogenic favorite. And in 2016, Condé Nast Traveler listed UNC’s campus as one of the most beautiful college campuses.

But the Robert B. House Undergraduate Library sticks out because of its different aesthetic — an aesthetic that has caused many UNC students to take to social media outlets like “Overheard at UNC” to criticize it. And many have started to refer to the UL as “the ugly library.”

Staff writer Rashaan Ayesh talked with Stephen Clipp, a Chapel Hill and Blowing Rock-based architect, about the design of the building and his personal take on it.

The Daily Tar Heel: Do you think the Undergraduate Library is ugly?

Stephen Clipp: I think it’s dated. I don’t think it’s ugly. I actually think its proportions are decent. It is dated, I think it was built in the '80s. It’s dated at this point.

I won’t say it’s ugly, but it’s more background to more interesting buildings. There used to be more of a style called brutalist.

And it is halfway between brutalist and bureaucratic, which I have to imagine would come across as being unattractive to most undergraduates.

It looks like a building you’d have to force yourself to go into because that’s where you work, rather than something you want to go into because it’s enjoyable.

DTH: Do you think it is possible to modernize the current design?

SC: No. They’d have to change the skin. It’s too strong of a building to easily change, meaning it has a strong physical characteristic to it. It’s not readily adaptable. The whole idea with university buildings — they want them to be strong buildings and have a character that stands out.

And they hope that character stands out to carry it for a century. When you build a university building, you’re hoping that that building is there for a century, and it maintains a strong characteristic. So adaptability is not a characteristic they are trying for in a university building. Unfortunately, this is a university building where the style is out of style, therefore it seems to be ugly.

DTH: Have you seen any other buildings on UNC’s campus that are less attractive than the UL?

SC: No, I haven’t. This stands out. It stands out as being more unfriendly than any building I can think of on campus.

DTH: How does it compare to Davis Library?

SC: I like (Davis) a lot better, because, even though it is much taller and dominating, it has these little jet outs on the outside that you know are study rooms on the inside, so that gives it a human scale that UL does not have.

You feel these jet outs, and you get the idea that one or two people are in there working. So it breaks down this very large building into the personal scale.

DTH: How would you have designed the UL?

SC: That’s an unfair question in part because I would’ve designed it more the way the new library at State was designed — more with windows and openness to the outside, especially to the courtyard area.

And the very strong walls of this library appear to be more of a barrier than what I think is necessary, especially in a university library.

In a university library, the concept is the whole campus is the library and how you open up the library to the campus, and open up the campus into the library to get that flow between them. This is very much so a building that says, ‘The learning and the books are on the inside and they are in here.’

arts@dailytarheel.com