Here’s one college tradition I’m happy to see on the way out. Nearly every great university in America has some specimens of high modern architecture scattered among a larger number of magnificent old buildings. Especially as dormitories, these modernist buildings don’t work. They’re often impressive (in that nonetheless disappointing modernist way) from the outside, yet almost inhuman inside. These buildings seem to have been designed, not to house living students, but to appear in architectural textbooks. For the big picture here, read Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. For one way to handle the problem, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports from Princeton:

“This summer Princeton University will raze five Modernist dormitories by the architect Hugh Stubbins to make room for buildings that today’s students are likely to find easier on the eye.
The complex — Lourie-Love, 1922, 1940, 1941, and 1942 Halls — was built in 1964 and forms the bulk of Butler College, one of the university’s five residential colleges. With their staggered heights and concrete casements, the structures were intended as a modern interpretation of Princeton’s famous Collegiate Gothic aesthetic. The dorms’ oversized dark-chocolate bricks and signature concrete-waffle ceilings reflect a “postwar idea of being brutally honest to the nature of the materials,” says Stanley T. Allen, dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture.
“Architects have tended to like them more than non-architects,” says Jon D. Hlafter, the university architect at Princeton, explaining that students and parents who arrive on the campus expecting Gothic towers and arches are frequently disappointed by the Modernist dormitories.
Undergraduates have long considered Butler College the least desirable place to live on the campus — a complex worthy of its nickname, “the Butt.” Students complain about the dorms’ low concrete ceilings; dark, cramped rooms; and the exposed-brick interiors that, according to one student, “make it difficult to hang things.” The war-year names on some of the dorms — along with their bleak aspect and the decorative metal rooftop “bike racks,” which evoke barbed wire — have spawned the local legend that the quadrangle was built to resemble a concentration camp. “It’s the part of the campus you don’t see on the tour,” says Trenton Arthur, a freshman.”