University Place

cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight is really a remarkable evening because it's homecoming week here at UW Madison, and we get to have a talk on the buildings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Winston Churchill in contemplating in rebuilding the House of Commons after it was bombed in May 1941, famously remarked, "We shape our buildings, and afterward, our buildings shape us." This history of our buildings here at UW Madison that support the education, research, and public service missions of the university also tell the saga of how buildings have shaped the university over the years as a place to learn, to explore, to create, to perform, to come together like this, and to share. In many ways our campus is also a home. And that's why we have a homecoming. This is a home that's also a workshop, a research center, a healing place, a performance space. Thousands of people live here. More thousands travel here every day. It is a city without being a citadel. It is a destination for exploration. And I say our campus and our buildings with particular emphasis because they are ours. When I welcome a group of, say, fourth graders to a field trip here at the Biotech Center, I like to ask them, so, who owns the University of Wisconsin System and UW Madison in particular? And it takes them a while. I say, do you guys? Are you owners? And they're a little perplexed by that. And I say, are you guys taxpayers? And they don't think they are. And then I ask them, well, have you bought a Snickers bar recently? If you go to buy a one dollar Snickers bar at a store, how much to you actually have to plunk down? And they're some really smart Wisconsin fourth graders because they all know they got to pay about $1.06. So, then they realize and the lights go on, wow, I'm a taxpayer. I'm a citizen and I'm also a taxpayer, and as such, they have a stake in this place just like the folks that work here have a stake in their community. The story of the buildings of the University of Wisconsin Madison continues to unfold, scaffold by scaffold. I hope you keep some paper handy because there are a lot more chapters to be written. This week, we can celebrate UW Madison's homecoming with author and Wednesday Nite at the Lab regular Jim Feldman, who published in 1997 his remarkable book "The Buildings of the University of Wisconsin." This is my copy of it. It's very well-worn, and it happens to end in 1996 with the opening of this building. There's been...

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This is the one on Henry Mall. It's not really good to get in an argument with an author.

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But since I have the book right here and I checked.

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I'll stand by that, sorry.

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And if any of you have seen a campus map from 1996, and looked at it and imagined, and go out and see what the campus is like today, you realize that this place is still a splendid work in progress. It's a great place to work. It's a wonderful place to live, and it's a splendid place to be able to welcome people from all over Wisconsin. I think we're going to have a great story tonight. Please join me in welcoming Jim Feldman to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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>> Am I live yet? Well, thank you all for coming and for foregoing the first game of the World Series. I'm not sure I would have made this decision.

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In 1949 at the dedication of Babcock Hall, regent John Jones said, "A university is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other." And he said, "Out of these three parts, the state has to provide the log." In 1996, I published a book called "The Buildings of the University of Wisconsin." That book and this talk are about the log. The book is out of print, but copies are available at the Madison Public Library, the University Archives, and a CD-ROM version of the book is available for purchase from the author. The university has had a physical existence for 160 years. In all that time, the boiling and churning of construction has never stopped and rarely even slowed. What this means is that any picture, book, or description of the university is no more than a snapshot and valid for that instant in time only and no other. My book, an encyclopedic account of the buildings, is a mere 15 years out of date, but to illustrate the snapshot nature even of that work, I show you now a partial list of buildings that are in the book that are now gone. The unlovely and unloved twin towers of Ogg Hall. The AW Peterson building, two and a half stories of paper student records replaced by a computer server the size of a refrigerator. EB Fred Hall, replaced by a much larger and more sophisticated bacteriology hall. Union South, too small and underused.

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Ted Crabb told me that the message from Union South was the genius of the construction and operation of Memorial Union. Full disclosure, Ted Crabb was the director of Memorial Union.

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And the nurse's dorm, a perfect example of the boiling and churning. This building on the screen stood, essentially, exactly where we're sitting right now. Now, here are buildings that are too recent to have been in the book. The Wisconsin Discovery Center, a blend of basic research and industrial development. The new twin towers of Ogg Hall. The Newell J Smith Residence Hall on Park Street. The new administration building, the home of the refrigerator with all the records on it. Rennebohm Hall, the College of Pharmacy on the far west end of campus, and Dejope Hall, the Taj Mahal by the lake. The Porter Boathouse, a straight replacement for the old used up one that was already in that same spot. The Genetic Biotechnology Center which is this building, Tom, and not the last one in my book.

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The Energy Institute at University and Breese. I have no idea what goes on here. The major addition to the Chazen Art Museum on campus. The new Union South which hopefully incorporated all the lessons learned from the old one. The Institute for Medical Research, again on the far west end of campus. Like my book, every student, faculty member, and worker at the UW has a mental image of the campus that corresponds to their era. The era can be as short as a year or as long as a career. I invite you all now to mentally compose your own mental snapshot of the university campus. Over the years, there have been a few representative ones. For the few dozen students 1851 to 1855, there was only one snapshot. This is it. North Hall. Now, this picture shows North Hall when it was already 30 years old. In the same way that you might wonder what it means that Cher is 66, a person might reasonably ask what there is about North Hall that's 160 years old. It's been renovated so many times and so extensively that the original configuration can hardly be made out, but the crude stone box is still there and performing useful work. Notice the hitching post and the young Bascom Hill elms. This building held the entire university, lecture halls, dormitories, dining hall, and chapel, and the faculty lived there too. Just picture it.

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Now, the next snapshot would have served as the single picture for all students from 1855 when South Hall was built until the horse barn was built off the back of the hill. This etching of North, South, and Main Hall represents the entire vision of the founders. The university was intended to comprise these three buildings in total. Very quickly now the university expanded so that a student snapshot from 1900 would have looked absurdly crowded and inexplicable to the previous few classes. The library, the log building, and engineering were all crowded willy-nilly onto the hill. In the right foreground, you can see the corner of the State Historical Society building. The first advance of the UW off the bottom of the hill to the east. The next era was marked by the large expansion of the agriculture campus already established on the back of the hill, and the liberal arts, law, and engineering students may never have ventured back there to see them. Here are a few representative examples. Agriculture Hall was the main edifice of the Ag College. This is one of my favorite stories in the whole deal. The first dairy building. Professor Babcock was stung by European criticism that there was no dairy school in the United States. He and his farm manager took $1,000 of state money, their own labor, and built this dairy building. Then, in a work of genius, he would invite the state legislatures to come and view the classes and then make them stand because there was no room.

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This is a single-purpose lobbyist here. I want him on my side. And the result of that lobbying was Hiram Smith Hall which was built in seven months for $32,000. It's often referred to as the first dairy building in the northern hemisphere. It wasn't even the first one on its own campus. From this point on, a student snapshot would depend very heavily on what program they were in and where they lived. This is certainly true today. A student in law or the hard sciences might never even know about or hear of the Carrot and Beet Lab or the Poultry Research Lab. It is obvious from this discussion that every snapshot is defective, incomplete, inadequate, and deceptive. But conversely, every snapshot is sacred. Think how you feel about buildings erected after your era. Unless you are unusually tolerant, your response is probably indifference at the very best, contempt and revulsion at the worst.

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My late father-in-law attended the university in the 1920s and intensely disapproved of nearly everything built after 1930.

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This attitude is not the sole domain of the grumpy layman. Here are the words of Reuben Thwaites, a respected 19th century historian and editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. Speaking of North and South Halls, he said, the taste of later generation has sometimes patronized them while committing expensive atrocities in other materials. And of Science Hall he said, it will doubtless stand indefinitely, a monument to the prosperity, progressiveness, bad taste, and good intention of the late '80s.

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The man knew what he meant to say. I will know present a handful of buildings that are almost certainly in any student of faculty member's snapshot. You would have to have a really unusual stint at the UW to not be familiar with these buildings, maybe not have classes in them. By 1856 there were 169 students at the UW. This was dangerously close to the maximum of 256 envisioned by the founders. As ludicrous as this now seems, it was 30 years before this figure was regularly exceeded, making it one of the most accurate long-term enrollment projections in university history.

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At that time, the regents said it has become a matter of strict necessity to proceed to the erection of the main edifice of the university. Building and funding the main edifice turned into an ugly, divisive, and embarrassing fiasco that damages the university's reputation and finances for years. The regents wanted a lot from their new building. Here are the specifications from the regents to the designers. Lecture halls, an observatory, dining hall, a chapel, all the departments and laboratories in science, literature and the art, the professional schools of medicine and law, apartments for two families of the faculty, and later on it was pressed into use as a drill hall and a water tower as well. The regents told their building committee, in a word it should be plain, substantial, comfortable, and exactly adapted to the purpose for which it is designed and no other. In a word, it would be none of these things.

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When bids were opened, none of them came in under the amount available. The building committee removed the basement, the furnishings for the upper floors, and other features and finally got an acceptable bid. As construction proceeded, the deleted items were added back in. When it opened, it was a year late and 50% over budget. This money was made up from the university endowment's principal fund. Here's the earliest known picture. In its first year of use, the students were building fires on the basement floor to stay warm.

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Fumes from the chemistry lab were disturbing the whole building and the roof leaked. In 1892, enrollment passed 1,000, and since no other building for instruction had been built, the crowding was fierce. The main edifice now known as Main Hall was expanded with the south wing in 1898. So you also see they build a new portico. So, the new portico and the new south wing were added at this time. The north wing waited until 1905 when enrollment had passed 3,000. So the north wing is over on this end. Also, by this time, the statue of Lincoln is there. In 1916, a fire of unknown origin came within a whisker of destroying the whole building. The long forgotten water tank saved the building when the dome collapsed into it. When I was working in the University Archive on my book, I used to hear then-director Frank Cook, who had a big copy of this picture on his wall, tell particularly insistent customers, the people would say you must have grandpa's papers. Frank would say, well, I think the papers you want are right about here.

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In June of 1920, the name of the building was changed to Bascom Hall and ended up in this configuration. The theater wing, on the north side, was opened in 1927 and replaced and outdoor theater on the hill behind the building. This is one of the things my father-in-law hated. He loved that outdoor theater, and he thought this was an abomination. Before the current Science Hall, there was an old Science Hall. Bet you didn't know that, did you? It stood in exactly the same spot as the current Science Hall, was built in 1877 to house all the science and engineering departments, all the things that stunk up an endangered Main Hall. It was very successful for seven years. Then, a forge fire destroyed the building. Within a few weeks, the regents, engineering professor Allan Conover, and an architect had developed plans to replace Science Hall with four separate

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the chemical engineering building, a machine shop, a boiler house, and a new Science Hall. I show you the three small buildings first. This is chemical engineering and the machine shop. These two buildings stood where Helen C White is now. The machine shop is behind the chemical engineering building The state appropriated $190,000 for all four buildings. The regents started with the three smaller buildings. I'm sorry, the third one is the boiler house. The three smaller buildings soaked up most of the appropriation, and the regents were forced to exercise the default clause in the contract and turn the superintendents of the project over to Professor Conover who successfully complete the three small buildings in 1885. Okay, so the three little ones are built. By then, the regents had obtained bids for the new Science Hall. All the news was bad. The lowest bid was higher than the entire appropriation. The regents simply rejected all the bids and gave the job to Professor Conover. He began promptly even with plans never located or improvising as he went. By April of 1887, the regents had spent the entire appropriation, the insurance money, and another $30,000 borrowed from local banks, and still Science Hall was without roof, windows, or doors. When the regents asked the legislature for another $200,000 to finish the building, the state responded briskly by appointing a bipartisan committee to investigate the expenditure of the appropriation. This committee had three basic questions. Where had the original appropriation gone? They brought in a Chicago bookkeeper to help answer the question.

The question

a person who would look at these books and not go anywhere else would be entirely misinformed as to the actual condition of the finances of the university.

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he could form no estimate of the university fund at all from the books. The second question was, how had the regents expected to finish the building? The asked Regent Keyes, did you understand that the '85 appropriation was simply, as you would call it, a starter? The answer was, well, I don't know what you're trying to get at.

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The old principle that when you're accused of something, you have to say something. The third question was, how much authority did the regents think they had? The answer was pretty clear. Why hadn't you the right to lay it out so that the state would have to pay a million for it. There's no limitation to the amount, is there? The answer from Keyes was, if the board of regents is of the opinion it ought to lay out a million dollars for the university, within the law it has a perfect right to do so. Haven't you compelled the legislature to make the appropriation to save the building? No, sir, we have not, as I look at it. The legislature can exercise its discretion. We have exercised ours.

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The regents had made clear where they thought the authority lay, and, in effect, the legislature agreed. The committee's final report referred to the plain disregard of legislative intent in a monstrous perversion in the spirit of the law. But on the same day, they passed the $200,000 appropriation. This conflict led to a law still on the books, that all contracts entered into by the regents must be signed by the governor, even if the project involves no state money. This has been sometimes an expensive and odious requirement but stands as a permanent reminder of the scandal surrounding the construction of the Science Hall group. In January of 1888, the first professor moved into the new building. Notice the edge of chemical engineering at the right side of the picture. And the boiler house in the shadow behind Science Hall. The wooden sidewalks extend clear across the unpaved Park Street. And this is just 1890. This is just a little while ago. Science Hall was home to nearly every scientific discipline at the university, almost all of which now have buildings of their own larger than the whole of Science Hall. The major tenants of the building now are geography, cartography, environmental studies, and Chicano studies. Science Hall's framing makes heavy use of steel as a structural element. This radical new technology was part of Conover's effort to make the building completely fire proof. Before there was a Memorial Union, there was an old student union. Built in 1905 by the YMCA, a student group rented it in 1907 and used it as a student union. By 1916, the Y had had enough of the students drinking and gambling and asked them to leave. The story of the Memorial Union

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fund-raising, construction, and use. In 1918, a fund-raising committee for a Wisconsin student union was formed. Headed by Regent Walter Kohler and included Porter Butts, the editor of the Daily Cardinal, the committee stood for years and yielded spectacular results. Their initial goal of a quarter million dollars was reached so quickly that the goal was immediately raised to $1 million. For the second phase, the committee concentrated on small donations, mostly from students. The campaign pitted university classes against each other. The class of 1926 fired a cannon across Observatory Hill for every $500 raised. I assume they didn't put a cannonball in it.

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While fund-raising proceeded, the design of the building was in process. The committee wished to hire their own architect, but the law require that state architect Arthur Peabody be responsible. So the best that could be done was to hire an assistant for Peabody. This arrangement predictably collapsed in acrimony, lawsuits, and payoffs. The 1925 plan Peabody submitted to the committee, a four-story building of Bedford limestone, Madison sandstone trim, a green tile roof, and steps of Winona travertine borrowed heavily from the northern Italian Renaissance palaces of Venetian Padua. Construction bids were received in June of 1926. All of them exceeded available funds. Butts convinced seven men to sign promissory notes of $10,000 each, and the lowest bid was accepted. Construction began in October of 1926. The contractor ran an open shop, and union members began to interfere with the project. They attacked and demolished temporary housing for the laborers and put several workers in the hospital. Madison police refused to interfere until a court order required that they do so. Work resumed and the cornerstone ceremony was held in May of 1927. No money had been budgeted for furnishings or finish. The regents approved borrowing $400,000 from the State Annuity Board. Thank you state workers. The union board hired French interior designer Leon Pescheret, the designer of the Drake Hotel in Chicago, who, with his wife, Porter Butts, and the union board, designed the interior of the Union. The completed Union opened in October of 1928 and was extremely popular. By June of 1929, more than a million visitors had used the Union, making it the busiest student union in the country. The greatest lack of the new union was the theater facilities which had been deleted for lack of funds. In 1937, with federal public works money available, Butts and the board hired Michael Herr, a young New York theater designer. Herr's first design for the wing was presented to the Board of Regents in October of '37. The regents hated it. They said the plan looked like a silo, a woman's hat, and a grain elevator.

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Within a few weeks, the facade of the building had been modified and blended suitably with the existing union. Ground was broken on the theater wing on January 1st, 1938. In July of '38, the west wing of the union collapsed without warning and killed two workmen. This is the picture from that investigation. And right here is where the wall collapsed. The theater wing was opened to the public on October 8th, 1938. Sinclair Lewis called it the most beautiful theater in the world. A feature of the Union likely to be in everyone's snapshot is the Union Terrace. This space was not included in the original design but was added at the suggestion of Arthur Peabody's daughter Charlotte. A few modifications to the exterior have been made since its completion. The Lakeshore cafeteria was expanded and glassed in. A renovation of the theater wing is underway now. Earlier this year, a small fire broke out in the construction area. Apparently, that part of the Union does not like being worked on.

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No significant damage resulted. Here is the finished Union from the air. Without including the renovation of the theater wing. Before there was a Red Gym and Armory, there was an old gym.

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This beauty was built in 1870 for drill space and recreational space and burned, perhaps torched, in 1891. It stood about where the Carillon Tower is now. Not just every university has a medieval castle on campus, but the UW does and for good historical reasons. They had no gymnasium after the 1891 fire. A tax by the legislature promised some funding for the gym. When the president and a regent committee examined the gymnasiums in the east, they saw that in many cases, the gymnasium also served as an armory. In the late 19th century there were a series of civil disorders around the country. The Haymarket riot and the Homestead, Pennsylvania, both occurred while the Wisconsin building was in planning and under construction. The design is very similar, both in appearance and function, to the eighth regimental armory in New York. The gym was built in brick instead of stone to keep cost down. By May of 1892 Conover and Porter had working drawings ready. The regents raised the appropriation to $100,000. Ground was broken in the fall of 1892. By September of '94 the work had progressed to the point shown here. A few late changes were made, including an external stairwell, here, that wasn't there on the original design. The men of the university had waited so long to have a gymnasium that they had to be retrained from using it until the contractor gave permission. In December of 1894 the gym was officially opened for use. In 1905, buttresses were added to the rear north wall to help avoid the kind of collapse which occurred at the New York armory after which this one was modeled. The use of the second floor as a public assembly hall included speeches by William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair, and Robert M La Follette. By 1911, after 15 years, the gym was too small. When it opened in 1894, the enrollment was about 700. By 1910, it was almost 2,000. One heavy user of gym space was the university basketball program. In the 1920s, Big Ten basketball teams were very popular in Madison. Until the construction of the field house in 1930, these games packed the Red Gym. The regents decided to expand the space by building an annex onto the east side of the gym. This annex stood until the mid-1950s. After the Memorial Union and the Field House were completed, the gym was little needed for mass meetings and was used mainly for student registration. This was still true in my day at the UW. It was just like that except the cars were newer. Plans to demolish the gym were developed and abandoned several times. A fire bomb in January 1970 started a fire which caused substantial but non-fatal damage to the gym. In 1993, a restoration converted the gym to a university visitor's center, multipurpose assembly space, and offices. These plans cost about $10 million or approximately 100 times the original cost of construction. I now proceed to some buildings that are almost certainly not in your mental snapshot of the UW. I have not cheated. All of these buildings are still standing and in use. The Magnetic Observatory. Entirely underground, the observatory was constructed in 1876 to house the federal Coast and Geodetic Survey's instruments. The location of the observatory is just below the southern edge of the Birge Hall greenhouses. It's really there. The federal program ended in the middle 1880s, and the observatory was used for cheese curing and general storage. It is now used by the Department of Zoology to strip flesh from animal skeletons. The dismembered animal parts are placed in cages with a kind of beetle which feed on the remains until the bones are completely clean. It smells just like you'd expect, too.

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The Carrot and Beet Lab. This building on Herrick Drive was built in 1912 for production of hog cholera serum. The protrusion just visible at the back was a crematorium used during an anthrax outbreak in the dairy herd. In 1960, the building was repaired and modified and put into use as the Carrot and Beet Lab. Activities include plant propagation for the breeding of carrot, onion, and table beet and for related genetic studies on these three crops. It's under the control of the Department of Horticulture. You may not even know where Herrick Drive is. It's way out on the west end of campus. You'd have to look at the map. I didn't know it was there. The Schuman Shelter. No one knows for sure why this building was built.

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Its first use, listed in 1963, was as a garage. It was assigned to what was then known as the Department of Physical Education for Women. By 1967, it is being referred to as the Intramural Warming Shelter. In December of 1978, the regents officially renamed the building now known as the Elm Drive Warming House the Carl Schuman Center. Carl Schuman worked as a maintenance man in the Department of Education for Women from '45 until '71. The Schuman Shelter is currently assigned jointly to kinesiology for storage and the physical plant for the restrooms. Here, on the other hand, is a building that is understood in detail when and why it was built. The Picnic Point Bathhouse. In 1965 as part of a decision to save the Willows Beach near the Elm Drive dorms, the university decided to establish a more permanent swimming facility on Picnic Point. A site was chosen, architects hired, plans approved, and the money raised. Construction took place in the summer of 1968. It is a 30 by 70 foot wedge sheathed in rough stone. Changing conditions, including increased algae in the lake, lack of roads and parking, simply made it too inconvenient and the beach and change house was never put into service. For 45 years it has been used as storage for the UW Physical Plant. In keeping with the week's theme of innovation, I present a few examples of innovation connected with the University of Wisconsin. This is by no means all of them, or even many of them. I picked ones that are associated with particular buildings. Science Hall is the oldest steel frame building in the world. There was an earlier one, an insurance company building in Chicago, which has since been demolished. As with any new technology, there was some confusion regarding terminology with sources referring to the material as iron, steel, or wrought iron. An investigation of this question was undertaken by the author in the fall of 1996. With the assistance of the University Physical Plant, samples were cut from the attic and floor rafters and joists and submitted for a metallurgical analysis. The results showed conclusively that the metal is steel. The same project showed that all the vertical supports are entirely masonry. Oldest steel building in the world, right down there. When Stephen Babcock came to UW, he was already a star in the agricultural field. He wanted to do an experiment involving animal feed, but Dean Henry would not give him permission. So Babcock went to work on something else. In 1890, he demonstrated the Babcock milk tester which accurately measured the butterfat content in raw milk. Before this time, dairies paid for milk by volume which allowed unscrupulous farmers to water skim or adulterate their milk without penalty. They did, too. There are accounts of milk cans with rocks in the bottom.

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With the tester, dairies began to produce a much higher quality and consistent product helping Wisconsin to gain its reputation as the Dairy State. This was especially true of the cheese industry. Of this test, Governor William Dempster Hoard said, "The Babcock test to the farmer was a more potent factor for righteousness than the bible because it showed up the culprit quicker."

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The milk test made huge strides in convincing state farmers to send their sons and daughters, and enrollment in the Ag College ballooned. Interestingly, Babcock felt that he should derive no personal gain from this testing device, and no patent was taken out. Sadly, this noble gesture resulted in chaos. Eager to meet high demand among dairies for the new tester, dozens of manufacturers began developing the test equipment. Many used improperly calibrated and poor quality materials the broke easily. Most of these Babcock testers failed to work, which diluted confidence in Babcock's invention, and there was nothing Babcock or the university could do about it because they'd given the technology away with no conditions. Besides Stephen Babcock, other giants of science have walked the halls of biochemistry on Henry Mall. Harry Steenbock joined the faculty in 1916. In 1924, he announced the discovery that irradiating animal feed produced vitamin D. Using his own money, Steenbock patented his development. Within a few years of the patent, the disease of rickets was virtually eradicated in the United States. He was offered a million dollars for the patent by Quaker Oats but rejected the offer, believing that he should not profit from his work at the university. On the other hand, the disaster caused earlier by Babcock releasing control of the butterfat test made Steenbock leery of letting the process go uncontrolled. He assembled eight donors, and together they collected $900 and founded the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WARF, to administer his patent. WARF has collected tens of millions of dollars from the vitamin D patent, much of it from milk producers. They have their own building. They have obtained and administered hundreds of patents and returned billions of dollars to the university. Hector DeLuca joined biochemistry in 1959 and greatly extended Steenbock's work on vitamins A and D. This allowed WARF to extend the patents on the process as well, which had expired by then. >> That's Karl Link. >> Do I have the slides mixed? >> Yeah. >> Oh well. So, you're saying this is...

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>> Pardon me? >> That's DeLuca there. >> It is? Okay. Keep that straight in your mind, kids.

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So this is Link? >> That's Link. >> Okay. >> Which one is link? >> Come on now. I'm assuming the guy in the middle of the picture. Karl Link came in 1927 while researching a cattle disease that prevented blood from clotting. Link successfully isolated the anticoagulant factor which initially found commercial application as a rodent killer. Named for WARF, Warfarin, as Coumadin, is now one of the most widely prescribed medicines in the world used in vascular and heart disease to prevent stroke and thrombosis. Do I have this one right? >> Yep. >> Thank god. Joshua Lederberg came to the UW in 1947. A pioneer in the field of molecular biology. In 1957, he founded the Department of Medical Genetics, and in 1959 won the Nobel Prize for his work in gene transfer in bacteria. Professor William King came to the UW and became the world's first professor of agricultural physics. One of his wide ranging fields of research was the storage of silage. At the time, most storage was done in pit silos, rectangular ground-level structures. King saw that the corners of a pit silo held rotted and incrusted silage. He recognized that a round silo would have no corners to be cleaned. He realized that a vertical silo would allow the silage to pack under its own weight, important for expelling air that causes rotting. Further, the contents could be easily unloaded into vehicles below the silo. He experimented but the finally built and demonstrated the first round tower silos at the UW Dairy Barn. So this is it. This is the first round silo in the world, and it's right down there. This innovation quickly spread throughout the world. Anybody that drives around the upper Midwest is familiar with this other picture. Rows and rows of huge round silos. My farmer brother-in-law tells me that they're actually going away from round silos now and going back to square ones and pits and bales and I don't know what all, but this was the first round one. Station WHA 970 is widely regarded as the oldest radio station in the United States. Starting with experiments by professor Edward Bennett, who started using the call signal 9XM in 1914, the station was housed in the basement of Sterling Hall until 1934 when it was moved to the old heating plant shown here. After WHA moved to Vilas Hall in 1972, this building kept its name of Radio Hall. Out of hundreds of buildings spanning more than a century, there's going to be a distinct range of styles. I present a handful of extremes. These selections are purely subjective in nature, and I'm willing to argue, but I doubt there will be too much disagreement. Here are, in my opinion, a few of the ugliest buildings on campus.

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I'm indebted to my friend Tom Zinnen for pointing out the expression "butt ugly" is an insult to certain butts everywhere.

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In acknowledging this point, I will refrain from using the expression. Humanities.

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Designed by Harry Weese of Chicago in the neo-brutalist architectural style. Was there ever a better named school? This building dedicated in the unthinkingly ironic words to beauty, harmony, and grace was a year late, significantly over budget, and its roof leaked. The rumor of the plans being upside down and Weese's suicide over the building are all wishful thinking.

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The building is scheduled for demolition in the next few years. ERB, the Engineering Research Building is a 14-story tower of precast concrete slabs without a hint of features on the brick face east and west sides, making it easily the starkest building on campus. Harold Rusch, the director of McArdle Labs, worked with architects to build as austere a building as could be built, with corridors and stairs as narrow as allowed by law and without frills like lobbies. Of this building, it can truly be said it is just as ugly on the inside as it is on the outside.

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The tiny windows were intended to maximize wall space for file cabinets and reduce energy loss. Except for the stylize cancer symbol that runs around the cornice, the decorative facing has no deliberate significance. The stories that it represents a punch card or the look of cancer itself are false. And Dr. Rusch said, "I was dismayed after the first few slabs were attached. I wished I had objected to the model. I felt apologetic." I had to look up to see if Dr. Rusch might be here tonight, but he isn't. On the other side of the coin, here, in my opinion, are some of the most beautiful buildings on campus. Music Hall, built in 1878 as a combination assembly hall and library in the pseudo-Gothic style, is a masterpiece of human scale, attention to detail, and fine materials. The stained-glass windows turn the interior into a kaleidoscope on a sunny afternoon. The excellent acoustics are an unexpected surprise. The working clock tower speaks of another era of technology, and the multicolor stone work has retained its beauty for 140 years. While perhaps not an obvious choice, King Hall shows a dedication to the practical German dedication to solidity, grace, and function. The brick circular arches, polychromatic brickwork, and graceful central tower are typical of the Richardson Romanesque style and give it a human scale and stolid functionality. Its somewhat stark lines have been softened by its current landscaping. Hey, I got to pick.

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As part of his salary negotiations, the regents promised to build Dean William Henry a house. Eventually, they did. This beauty was designed mainly by Dean Henry's wife Sarah, with the help of architects Conover and Porter. She called it Lake Dormer for its dense spectacular view of Lake Mendota. Two stories and an attic over a full basement, it was a residence for 90 years, after which it became administrative space. It is surely one of the most beautiful structures on campus and, in fact, all of Madison. Another Richardson Romanesque structure, the Agricultural Bulletin Building was originally the heating plant for the burgeoning agriculture campus. Its circular brick arches, polychromatic brickwork, and sense of great mass despite its modest size and the last 19th century smokestack on campus made it a natural for inclusion on the beauty list. It is now home to integrated pest and crop management programs. In closing, I thought you'd be interested to see the flow of construction on campus. Here's a graph showing the number of buildings erected by decade. This does not show the building boom since 1996. I wish to acknowledge my debt to the many people who helped and encouraged me, both in my book project and this presentation. I now invite any questions you may have.

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