Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is a fine firm with a history of fine buildings: the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, and more. Walter Netsch, who spent more than thirty years at SOM, designed the beautiful Cadet Chapel at the US Air Force Academy. But, unfortunately, he also created the lakefill and a number of buildings on Northwestern University's Evanston campus, namely the University Library.

The building is horrific. Netsch's high-tech concept for the stacks was shelves should be arranged radially around an information terminal, that students were meant to consult in order to find their books; the arrangement of shelves was to minimize the walking distance to the book. This may have worked in the 1970s, but is an antiquated approach when nearly everyone has a powerful computer on their person.

Another issue with the library, this one not Netsch's fault, is the location of the entrance. Netsch meant to arrange three towers around a central hub containing stairs, lifts, and the main entrance. The intended entrance hall is a café and a new entrance hall, closer to the existing Deering Library, was created adjacent to the south tower.

The library may be aesthetically and functionally ugly, with sandblasted limestone that mimicks concrete (oh so fashionable in its day) and a plaza with faulty drainage, but at least Netsch had the artistic insight to raise the stacks on columns so that one may stand on the central plaza and gaze out onto the blue expanse of Lake Michigan. But they summarily ruined the view by putting another concrete box in the way.

I never really had much to do with this library. I spent one summer hanging out in the basement "Information Commons" running simulations and trying to tease some synchronization out of mathematical neurons; I visited the career center's office for tips on my CV a couple of times; I checked out a lot of classic movies from the media library; I even studied in the stacks once or twice. Possibly my most memorable experience was going to the media center one afternoon to watch a movie for my German writing seminar. My professor had given me a German DVD so I needed the mysterious foreign DVD player with the antiquated CRT display and uncomfortable headphones, which seemed to match the tone of the film.