The Pomona College administration is working hard to sell its new landmark, the Smith Campus Center. This past weekend, during the dedication ceremonies that brought many of those who had given the $18 million to build the center, few were working harder than Robert A.M. Stern, head of the architectural firm that designed the building.

Stern led tours, lectured, and talked with trustees, donors and alumni. Preaching to the converted, mostly, but preaching indeed: "Everything short of a sports activity that can occur on a college campus can occur here."

Jon Coty Concrete Schoolyard: The center’s sturdy meeting spot.

Stern is a compact man, about five foot six, trim and perhaps balding. His hair is mostly gray and he has thin, hip tortoiseshell glasses. Overall, he looks a bit like Ben Kingsley in a suit. At a reception for "torchbearers" (read: donors of more than $100,000), he was accompanied by a staff of four. Though it sounded like they did most of the actual work on the building and he came into the studio occasionally to tell them what they were doing wrong, he was the focus of attention, even for them, and he spoke like a visionary.

It was a shame more students didn’t show up (and that more students weren’t invited) to hear what he had to say. For someone like myself prepared to write this article critical of both Stern and his building, what he said made a difference.

Like most works of Art, the Smith Center has a thesis behind it which helps to explain why it is the way it is. Whether or not a functional building on which the students of Pomona must now depend should require either a thesis, or an explanation for that thesis, is certainly up for debate, but knowing the intentions behind this building’s design makes it easier to understand.

Stern and his firm are students of history (albeit neoconservative ones) well-versed in campus architecture. They know all the names of the buildings on campus and tried to draw on the campus’s tradition. Stern repeatedly referred to this approach as "postmodern," and said that if "modern architecture looks away from the master plan" of the college then he was there to "put things back on track and trace lost ideas."

This master plan, developed in 1908, laid out the whole college around Marston Quad. Though the plan, of which Little Bridges and Carnegie are the only remnants, was abandoned with the onset of "modern" architecture during and after World War II, Stern chose to go back to its ideals with the Smith Center.

Jon Coty

In this vein, the building was designed to echo Little Bridges and Sumner Hall (originally on the quad), mimicking their slopes, arches, and classic dimensions. Stern and company attempted to strike a balance between this original form and the functions demanded of a modern student union in their building, emulating Hunt’s designs on a grander scale.

In the words of one administrator, though, "in trying to strike a balance between form and function, it’s clear that form has won out." This was not meant as a compliment.

The glance to tradition also mandated the building material: concrete. "Pomona College was one of the pioneering places for structural concrete," according to Stern. Though more expensive than simple steel-and-stucco construction, the architects felt concrete was justified to impress seriousness, stability and tradition. In fact, a lot of work went into determining the exact color of the concrete, to make it look the most like imitation wood.

Stern is the Dean of the Yale Architecture School. His firm includes more than 150 architects working on 100 projects at any given time. His work has been viewed as influential, even controversial, since the 1960s. In other words, he is a nationally famous architect. "Never hire a nationally famous architect," one administrator here at Pomona told me just two weeks ago.

Why not? Well, if someone is designing a building which they will have to explain and support with a national reputation, it’s pretty clear they’re going to want to call the shots on it. Make the mailroom central? Make the building a bit more colorful? Functional? Not if it has to "quote from history." Rumors of the back and forth between Stern and the planning committee as the building progressed paint him as a tyrant.

Stern and Co. wanted to respect the axis of the college, and hoped to use the campus center to tie the place together. Thus not only is there a complete sight line all the way from Mason to Smiley, but this corridor through the Smith Center is not encumbered by doors. Instead, "it flows," and the need for indoor A/C or heat is removed by the cavernous archway running east to west through the building.

Many of these features were true of the old coop. I realize writing this that my class was the last to know what it was like to be in that building. It combined indoor and outdoor elements and allowed anyone to walk from Mason to Smiley. But, perhaps revealing the year of its construction, 1968, it was a thick bunker that faced in, not out. And Stern was right when he said that it had no meeting space, nothing which drew students or demanded their attention.

This is not to say that the new building is any less massive than the old. It is certainly much more so, an enormous behemoth, a concrete colossus. This is, of course, Stern’s point. "It’s a social place, a cultural place, an enduring place" he said, emphasizing the latter. He spoke fondly of its "massiveness," and joked that "it’s gonna be awfully hard to tear this thing down." If the old coop was all grease and Street Fighter tournaments, "Here there is freedom in order."

Though students may disagree, Stern would probably choose the mailroom as a good example of what he is talking about. He seemed irritated when I suggested it was stuck in a corner.

"We don’t want you to stand there," he said. "Go out on the terrace, get a cup of coffee and sit down with your friends. The mail is an excuse to get you there. It’s not the final destination." Stern may speak impractically about these things because he’s a man of vision. In fact, Stern’s firm retains control of decisions made about the space for a full year. The rumors are true so far: they’ve forbade posting any bills on the windows within the building.

"College is not just pizza and video games," he chided me. "There was a rumpus room character [in Edmunds Union] that was a tyranny over other things that could have happened there. So it’s important to segment rooms off. The video games were on the front yard of the campus. People here are on their way to being adults, not just extended high schoolers. If they want to have a beer bust [?], fine, they can do it in the basement." Stern wants this building to both "present and represent" for the college, something which he felt the old one did not.

Stern led the torchbearers comfortably through the design and building of the Smith Center, consciously steering away from any of these troubling issues, careful not to mention specifics, opting rather to answer questions with big ideas. He went to a lot of effort to rip on buildings like Big Bridges, Thatcher, and Montgomery Gallery for their architectural merit, to the delight of the donors. They ate his rhetoric whole and looked ready to whip out the checkbooks for more new buildings at the end of the lecture.

"This building truly an addition for Pomona College," he congratulated. "I think we did a damn good job. Give me a new campus to start fresh with and I’ll be happy with that as well."

It’s interesting to hear his criticism of Pomona’s buildings, coming as it does from someone who has been called "The Martha Stewart of architecture." While he calls himself a "modern traditionalist," Architecture Magazine, upon his appointment at Yale, called him: "the suede-loafered sultan of suburban retrotecture, Disney party boy and notorious academic curmudgeon." Whence this reputation? And why is he at Pomona?

The answer to the latter may come from Stern’s association with the Disney corporation. Since 1992, he’s served on the board at Disney, although he’s worked for them since the early 80s. During his time there, he designed hotels, office buildings, "Celebration," the controversial Disney-developed "new town," and Michael Eisner’s vacation home. Disney scion Roy Disney is a Pomona graduate and currently on the Board of Trustees.

According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, "[he] was once at the cutting edge of architectural theory and practice... [but] became famous as a purveyor of houses that helped new money look like old money." It’s even rumored that Stern’s work inspired Tom Wolfe’s ultra-decadent descriptions in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Stern’s appointment at Yale caused no small uproar at the school and in the architectural world. Students walked out at his inaugural, and most thought the conservative turn his work took to be too out of touch with Yale’s progressive values.

He constructed a loft in New Haven stuffed with furniture normally found in modern art museums to combat this image, landing him a profile in the New York Times. But what the Times found in New Haven bears itself out in the Smith Center: The loft was put together very well on the surface, in the face it showed guests. But a peek behind the scenes revealed little functioning behind the outgoing image.

Not all the complaints about the building have been directed at the architect, though. There are two conference rooms on the second floor of the Smith Center. According to the administration, none other than Peter Stanley has approval of who uses the space, and "unless you’re a trustee or a Nobel laureate, you’re not going to set foot inside either of those rooms." Statements like this tend to irk students, especially because these rooms were finished handsomely while other student-friendly parts of the building were left until phase two of construction.

This makes Stanley et al sound just as pompous as Stern himself. The difference between the two is that Stern got his way and Stanley did not. And just as with Aramark’s contract renegotiation, the students now pay. Stanley himself had a vision for the new center as a place of "seductive power" for students. To quote Stern himself, though: "Scary things can happen quickly to a beautiful building."

Despite his efforts to portray himself as a martyr to the budget and Peter Stanley’s office, I found the closing comment of Stern’s tour revealing: "You can’t be both an architect and modest." And now we have a building designed by the former, which is certainly not the latter, and, in the whole mix of things, whose ultimate functionality has yet to be determined.