It's creepy and it's kooky. Mysterious and spooky. It's altogether ooky. It's Phillips Hall.
There are so many things wrong with Phillips Hall that we don’t know where to begin. We mean that literally. We don’t know where to begin in Phillips because it is a box with a million doors and entranceways that one will inevitably get lost in trying to navigate.
Then there’s the staircase. If you pay attention to the staircase on the left, back side, you will find that the door swings into the staircase instead of out of it.
What sense does that make? It makes the transition periods between classes even worse because people are simultaneously getting hit by the door and running down stairs.
Then there’s the ever-so-dim lighting of every corner of the building. Coupled with that is a floor that gleams of shine, yet sits on top of the bleakest gray floor in the world.
Is there an academic reason why we still use chalkboards? Call us millennials with no culture, but chalkboards are a thing of the past. Your hands are dusty after using chalk, and your ears will keep ringing with the excruciating sound of a squeaky chalkboard for the rest of the day.
Maybe what makes it so bad isn’t its aesthetics or its muggy smell. Maybe it’s the challenging nature of the main disciplines in the building (math, physics). It’s enough to give someone a natural aversion to the place.
C.C. Cook, don’t take this personally. When you designed this building in 1919, Phillips Hall represented the peak of Collegiate Gothic architecture. We’re sorry to say that now it represents some of our worst fears.
