Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Young Architecture Connoisseurs

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | October 12th, 2015

Changes afoot on university campuses make it likely that many new employees will have different responses to the design of the office buildings of prospective employers than their parents did when they were workplace newbies. As Nick Saval reports in his September 10, 2015, article in the New York Times (“If You Build It, They Will Come . . . Won’t They”), “On campuses today, you will find neoclassical libraries cheek by jowl with glassy, postmodern student centers. From Rem Koolhaas’s aggressive cantilever for Milstein Hall at Cornell, with its concrete-­and-­glass horizontal slab jutting out from old brick, to Zaha Hadid’s razor-­sharp Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State, many college campuses have become places to see the most daring, up-to-date work of globe-trotting ‘starchitects.’” Students graduating from schools that have invested in high-style architectural wonders will, through their exposure to these fashionable buildings, have developed a different …