“the embattled university”

Minneapolis, MN

Student Protest and Architecture at the University of Minnesota in the 1960’s and 1970s

During the 1960s and 1970s, universities across the country experienced unprecedented growth and social upheaval as the baby-boom generation asserted its values by protesting for civil rights and student power, and against the Vietnam War. While much is written about student activism during this time, scholars seldom examine these protests through the lenses of architecture and campus planning. This study contends the designed environment of the university embodies the cultural and social values of the institution. Therefore, students used buildings, landscapes, and spaces throughout campus as places of protest against the values embodied within the architecture. Using the University of Minnesota as a microcosm of national trends, this thesis aims to find out why specific spaces on campus are chosen as nodes of protest, in order to understand the role of architecture in shaping activism. These locations—the Armory, student union, administration building, and auditorium—contain controls and affordances for protests that influenced why these spaces were repeatedly chosen for student activism. The design, association, and program of these buildings and the spaces around them, principally elements of massing, scale, ornamentation, and association, created a stage in which protests gained legitimacy and visibility for their causes. Archival materials used for this exhibition—particularly newspaper clippings, photographs, and oral histories—validate and characterize these findings. Further analysis and diagramming were presented with archival materials as an exhibition entitled “The Embattled University”, to highlight the relationship between architecture and activism.

Undergraduate Latin Honors Thesis

Recipient of the King Medal for Excellence in Architectural and Environmental Design by the Architectural Research Centers Consortium, 2017.

Full text and exhibition available at: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/188052