Well, I kind of got double-whammied this time around. This month, 12 of 12 not only falls on a weekday, but it’s spring break, which means there’s even more of nothing going on at work than there was on the 12th of last month.
So, this time I decided to do 12 of 12 a little differently.
It’s not that I don’t have many, many, many books in my office that I bought and haven’t gotten around to reading (I have read many of them, but the percentage of unread books is growing). It’s a nice, sunny day today, so I decides to go for a walk around campus with my camera to see what I could spy with my little eye.
It’s so quiet without the students here!
They recently put a statue of labor activist César Chávez in front of our building. I think it was part of a desperate attempt to get some statues of non-white people up on campus, especially given all the Confederate statues that they’ve obstinately refused to take down over the years. They did a nice job on it, and for once they designed some seating around it instead of just plopping the statue down in a garden where no one can see it.
On the other hand, I always have a moment flashing back to that sketch on MadTV where they lampooned Ricky Martin with a “video for his new single: Chavez! Chavez!” (off of the album Ricky Martin Has Not Sold Out His Latino Heritage). The video, which has been taken off of YouTube, was hilarious and featured Ricky attempting to “celebrate his Latin heritage” by getting dancing girls to smear themselves all over a portrait of Chávez. (You kind of had to see it.)
It makes me giggle.
Across the way is the Flawn Academic Center, which used to house the Undergraduate Library until they decided to get rid of all the books. This statue is right in front, and I just can’t get over how I can’t decide whether it’s more homo-erotic, or whether it reminds me of something that the Nazis would have built for the 1936 Berlin Olympics (or possibly both).
I’ve also thought that the FAC building looks very much like one of the palaces that the late Shah of Iran built (minus the domes). Seriously, it looks almost exactly like the main residence at Niavaran (not that I’ve been there). I’ve often wondered if some of his money went toward the construction of the building.
The latticework over the windows is one reason: the geometric patterns are quite reminiscent of contemporary Islamic art, which uses a lot of repeating geometric shapes and formulas. In Islamic numerology, one of the numbers that symbolizes God is infinity, because God is infinite. Although I’m not a terribly religious person (like, at all), I’ve always found this really neat — I’ve found a lot of stuff about the medieval Islamic empires really fascinating. They were far ahead of Europe in its “dark ages,” but somewhere along the way, that scientific and cultural introspection turned to self-preservation and stagnation and Europe surged ahead. It’s one of the reasons I became an historian.
The turtle pond. (They’ve given up trying to give it an actual name. “The Turtle Pond” it is, and shall be.)
Get a room, guys!
‘Round the corner from the turtle pond is the Main Building (commonly known as “The Tower”). The windows on the main section all have Greek or Hebrew letters underneath them, and I’ve never found a reason why. (It’s a Freemason plot!!) I’ll bet this gets used as a plot device in National Treasure 3.
I could sell this one and make a lot of money off of our rich alumnae…
I do appreciate sometimes that there was thought put in to landscaping the campus and giving everything a common look. My undergraduate institution was all neo-Communist concrete, and looked like something Stalin might have built to subdue Poland, so I’ll take trees and red-tile roofs any day!
One of the reasons why they put in statues of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Barbara Jordan, and César Chávez is because they still have statues of (Confederate States of America president) Jefferson Davis and a number of the other Confederate leaders around campus, and have rather staunchly opposed suggestions that they be removed. The argument is that they are historic figures of great importance to Texas.
They were at least smart enough not to put MLK and Jefferson Davis next to each other.
The soaring windows of the architecture library. It’s springtime in Austin!
Oh, and here’s my gratuitous photo of Mocha. Now she has a global fan club, I just can’t disappoint 
