Huntsman Hall: The Rat Race Starts with a Maze [Edit 1]

"Architecture is the art of how to waste space." --Philip Johnson quoted in the New York Times

The Wharton MBA rat race begins and ends in the maze that students call Hunstman Hall. I call it a maze because the layout of this building confuses new visitors. I imagine that the architects return to Huntsman Hall every fall to giggle themselves silly as gaggle after gaggle of new students attempts, in vain, to go where it's supposed to be going. The place is less amazing than it is a maze.

For example, there's a subterranean 4,000-square-foot conversation/lounge pit (the Patty and Jay H. Baker Forum) that's protected from the large, sloping Walnut Street entrance ramp by a curving, floor-to-ceiling red stone wall that forces entering traffic to veer left or right. The wall encloses and protects the sanctity of the pit and renders it cozy by serving as a baffle. Groups entering from Walnut Street hit the wall, divide, and gradually sift into the pit. This is good. But the baffle function that works so well for entering traffic serves to confuse exiting traffic. From my vantage point in the pit, I saw a number of newly admitted members of the class of 2007 wedge themselves between the curved wall and the staircase that it hides in an attempt to get to the entrance ramp.

The architects attempted to create a building that serves both graduate MBA students and undergraduate business students by separating the traffic flow of these two populations, but what they ended up with is a building that suffers from annoying traffic flow problems and that ultimately serves each population less well. For example: MBA students who use the despicable commercial-cafe-that-must-not-be-named can only get to the MBA lounge by a long, circuitous loop out into the hallway and around to the MBA lounge entry on the mezzanine above the Walnut Street entrance. MBA students don't have much patience for these architectural shenanigans so they use a silly little door behind the cafe's cashier to move between the two spaces. Whose brilliant idea was that?

In truth, it doesn't appear that anybody had any brilliant ideas when it came to traffic flow. The high-traffic areas feel cramped during the busier times of the day, the elevators are slow, and the escalators are not wide enough for students in a rush to pass the fatasses who can't be arsed to walk up stairs that move.

And the masses of people! Huntsman Hall is packed full of people on a normal class day. There are just too many people in the damned place, which leads me to believe that it may be functioning as a swing space for business-like classes as other areas around campus undergo renovation.

So much for traffic. How about the rest of the building?

It's not that erecting showy, state-of-the-art buildings guarantees more or better students; rather, schools have acknowledged that the new facilities are required to keep attracting any students at all. (source)

The building was designed to be showy. It accomplishes that task marvelously and (thankfully) quite a bit more tastefully than if it had been named Trump Hall. Its wooden, brick and glass interiors scream "modern capitalists are being minted here!"

And so we come full circle: Hunstman Hall is itself Wharton's latest weapon in the rat race between schools to hook and land a higher percentage of their admitted applicants. The maze is both a means and an end.

Edit 1: Rewrote first two paragraphs to render them less unintelligible.