<p>I recently visited Amherst and was left with a couple questions:</p>
<p>1) I felt an architectural incohesiveness of campus. I didn’t notice the traditional quad type of arrangement. How is the feel of the campus? Is it as ehh as I remembered it?</p>
<p>2) The library felt sort of dusty, drab, and bland. Are there any newer, comfortable parts of it to do work into the early morning and “chill”?</p>
<p>3) There seemed to be a lack of eating options. Can this get annoying? Old? How is the food?</p>
<p>4) The campus seemed sort of unpopulated. What is the normal feel?</p>
<p>5) All the buildings, compared to a school like Duke, seemed dark and sort of run down. Is it not as bad as I remembered it?</p>
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<li>Yes, this is true. One may argue that this variation in style is better relative to campuses where the architecture is predominantly Gothic or predominantly modern. One trades uniformity for variety. But at least there’s no extreme variation that’s corrosive to the eyes–e.g., MIT’s cold sepulchers v. its dimensionally-warped buildings.</li>
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<p>What’s the traditional quad arrangement? An actual quadrilateral?</p>
<p>Did you visit on a rainy/dreary New Englandy day?</p>
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<li><p>I thought libraries were supposed to be “dusty, drab, and bland.” The A Level, where all the computer stations are located, is a great place to work. There are complaints against the library from administrators who’ve been here for a long while, and they’re legitimate. It serves its purpose, but, yes, it lacks the Gothic majesty and the wide open spaces of Columbia’s library, say, that fills one with ethereal loftiness… but one goes to the library to study in quiet spaces, not to soak in the atmosphere.</p></li>
<li><p>True. There’s a great deal of variety at Val which requires more creativity on the students’ part. I know a couple of students who have taken buses to UMass to have dinner there. And, there are many restaurants in town to humor exotic and privileged palettes.</p></li>
<li><p>The peak times are (MWF) 9:50 AM, 10:50 AM, 1:50AM; (TTh) 9:50 AM, 10:20 AM, 1:50AM. Otherwise, students are either in class or studying. Only on beautiful days or weekends do students lounge around and relax. When I had visited Princeton, a university, on a fall afternoon, the entire campus was completely deserted as well. You’ll find this everywhere where students take their work seriously.</p></li>
<li><p>Most of the dorms are very recently renovated. Sure, the Dining Hall and the Library don’t have vaulted ceilings and sky-high windows. The Science Center is like catacomb, but that will be the first building to be completely renovated. It’s true that many classrooms are older, but they aren’t insufferable. Part of Amherst’s reluctance to invest in reconstruction is to preserve the old feel, but complaints are legitimate.</p></li>
<li><p>Campus-centric. One has the Five College campuses as well, which most students learn to take advantage of to their own benefit.</p></li>
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<p>I think Amherst is very beautiful. It is a different aesthetic than Duke and the like. Duke was built to look more stately and historic than it actually is – it’s essentially a set designed for a certain effect. Amherst, in the older buildings you describe as “dark and sort of run down”, is actually historic. It’s a kind of simple New England functionality that is quintessential of the time of its founding. Other buildings added as time moved forward add their own individualistic textures to the campus, but the predominant feeling is that historic small New England human-scale quality – where the lessons learned in that old Protestant tradition are learned by looking inward, not upon idols and edifices.</p>
<p>The eclectic nature of the campus as a whole is definitely noticeable, but to me makes the place look more authentic and less like a theme park. Not necessarily to everyone’s taste, but I appreciate it.</p>
<p>The libarary seems mostly just functional to me, not a place to go and inhale the atmosphere, for sure. I don’t think anyone’s overall experience of the school is dimished by the library, but if grandeur or impact is sought… well, yeah, it’s sure not there.</p>
<p>I think in its way there is a humbleness to the campus that does reflect the roots and founding mission of the college. I know “humble” is an odd word to use in connection with Amherst --long a hothouse for the children of wealth and privilege-- but the campus itself does retain the historic character of the place, even as it’s been tweaked, restyled and reinvented at different points when new construction has taken place. It’s never going to be impressive in that faux-gothic way of some schools with spires, vaulted ceilings and gargoyles. It’s not the nature of the place.</p>
<p>I personally just love the scale and simplicity of the campus, the look-inward vibe it supports… but people are drawn to different aesthetics and are enlivened by different environments.</p>
<p>Sort of. It’s basically an arrangement of buildings that face each other; more often than not, it’s in conformity to a city block, with the inner walls forming a courtyard. For this reason, we tend to associate them with the great. city-centered universities, Oxford and Cambridge – both located in the middle of fairly busy medieval cities.</p>
<p>However, if you’re in the middle of rural New England, there’s less need to maximize land utilization by constructing buildings right to the edge of the sidewalks (in fact, you’re lucky if you can find sidewalks.) Instead, the buildings typical of any LAC dating before the American Civil War would be as `rentof2 described them: small, salt box shaped affairs, sometimes built in a row, sometimes a single building occupying an exalted spot all its own.</p>
<p>And, it’s true that Amherst goes to great lengths to preserve the conceit. A few years ago, when given the opportunity to build a pair of brand new buildings to replace the spartan James and Stearns dormitories – Amherst tore them down and built nearly exact replicas of them.</p>