Professors needed more whiteboard space. The dean wanted connectivity for laptop computers. Students were begging for better chairs.
Voilà! This fall, the Law School opened its classrooms to reveal a digital facelift. Keeping pace with the way law is practiced today—when litigants file court documents electronically and judges participate in videoconferences—the 16 refurbished rooms have more high-tech gadgets than a studio at Skywalker Ranch.
Teaching a course in environmental law? Draw a river on a “smart” whiteboard and it will automatically be saved onto the Internet, where it can be e-mailed to students or recalled for a future class.
Want to look closely at a piece of evidence? Place the bloody knife on a document camera and a 3-D rendering will be projected onto a screen at the front of the classroom.
Completing the $8 million makeover in a single summer required cooperation among more than 100 electricians, carpenters, plasterers and painters, who had to ply their trades without tripping over one another. They ripped out heating, air conditioning and lighting systems, tore into walls and installed new steel.
Translucent shades now block glare but let daylight in. Cloud ceilings conceal all sorts of electrical goodies and give the tiered, terra-cotta landscape a Georgia O’Keeffe touch. With the flick of a wireless card, students can connect their laptops—mandatory equipment for the past few years—to the net. And the ergonomically engineered chairs that the school picked up at bargain prices as dot-coms went under? “They’ve generated great goodwill,” Dean Kathleen Sullivan told the Faculty Senate in October.
Although the rough, unfinished concrete that was all the architectural rage in the mid-’70s still defines the halls and walls, its “brutalist” effect has been softened. As Sullivan put it: “we call it brutalism with a kinder face.”
