You look around UNCG’s beautiful campus and see a similar theme among the buildings; brick. The beautiful red brick that runs down College Avenue and holds all of the dorms tall and strong makes the campus easy on the eyes. That is until you shift your vision to the tall white building standing in the middle of it all. This is our library, with tiny slit windows and plain white concrete, some often mistake it for a prison. It makes you wonder how this add on to the original brick library came to be, when it obviously does not coincide with the aesthetic of the rest of campus. Now the inside of the library isn’t as bad, though I believe it could use an update.
This isn’t to say I hate our library, I in fact love many of the services it provides and can often be found in a study room late at night, or using a dual monitor desktop to aid in my research. But for all the wonderful things this library provides, you can’t deny the tall white building sticks out like a sore thumb on campus.
My friends and I, like many others, often find ourselves questioning how this decision was made and offer our own solutions to make it more appealing to the eye. Was it the lack of funding? Did things just get weird in the 80’s or something? Some say we should allow the art students to paint a mural on it, to highlight the uniqueness of UNCG and the student body here. Others say we should just build a new one out of brick, or maybe make it full of windows. Some are unbothered by the appearance and only care that they can study there. At the end of the day Club Jackson is an essential part of campus that is loved by many, there’s just no denying it’s pretty ugly.