So long, HARRELSON - NC State Alumni Association

nc state | spring 2016
NC STATE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION | Campus Box 7503 NC State University Raleigh, NC 27695-7503
Spring 2016
So long,
HARRELSON
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4/13/16 3:43 PM
Love it or loathe it,
NC STATE’S ROUND BUILDING LEF T AN IMPRES SION.
photograph by doug van de zande
by Josh Shaffer
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spring 2016
F
or more than 50 years, Harrelson Hall has loomed over the Brickyard like
a flying saucer on stilts — a circular freak of a building that flummoxed students with its spiral ramps, windowless classrooms and ductwork that whooshed like a subway tunnel.
It spawned horror stories from students who wandered lost inside its corkscrew hallways, craned their necks to see equations scribbled around curving
blackboards and struggled to make sense of restroom stalls shaped like pie slices.
It inspired ridicule and pranks as much as scholarship. www.alumni.ncsu.edu 29
When word got out that the
design for NC State’s new circular
classroom building called
for Indiana limestone facing,
North Carolina’s brick industry
was incensed. In April 1960,
The Sanford (N.C.) Herald ran an
editorial with the headline “Let’s
Use Home Brick,” railing against
the idea of using stone from
outside North Carolina.
The decision “does little to
make happy the gigantic brick
industry in North Carolina and
the thousands of people who
derive their livelihood from
it,” the editorial said.
The state’s budget was tight,
so college officials looked into
the cost savings of using grey
brick to form the vertical “stripes”
between the windows instead of
limestone. It might have happened
if it hadn’t been for Henry
Kamphoefner, the legendary
dean of the School of Design.
Kamphoefner wrote an
impassioned letter to Chancellor
John Caldwell, saying that budget
concerns should not be allowed
to “reduce the building to stodgy
mediocrity.” Brick panels would
introduce a horizontal character
into the vertical intent of the
panels, he noted, and added
that brick had become
monotonous throughout the
central part of campus (this was
before the Brickyard, mind you).
“It is time a relieving material
be used at a major focal point,”
Kamphoefner wrote. “The
brick industry should not be
allowed to dictate design.”
Caldwell agreed, and fired off a
memo to campus planners:
“The decision has been made
firm that we will retain the
limestone in Harrelson Hall.”
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spring 2016
Four agricultural engineering students drove an MG Midget up the ramp in the late
1970s. Skateboarding in Harrelson became an unofficial sport at NC State, as did rollerblading, shopping cart riding and Super Ball bouncing. (A video posted on YouTube—
just search for “Harrelson Hall”— captured 2,000 balls bouncing down the ramp.)
But Harrelson’s long reign as NC State’s best-known oddity has expired, and the
demolition date is drawing near. As the campus says goodbye to this misfit of a building, a curious fondness is emerging for the structure, which will be reduced to a heap
of rubble this summer.
Its construction did, after all, grow out of a burst of 1960s energy, a period of daring
that launched the space program and urged a crew-cut-wearing nation to grow its hair
into a Beatles mop. Harrelson’s designers believed architecture played a vital role in
shaping and improving human life, giving it zest and originality. For all their mistakes,
those minds earn posthumous marks for effort.
To understand Harrelson, it’s important to remember how the campus looked prior
to 1962, when the building opened its doors to students. In that era of conformity, much
of NC State looked like a place that spared every expense on its buildings, churning out
rows of bland brick boxes and leaving the fancy stuff to Chapel Hill.
And today, a few still offer a tribute to Harrelson and the inventive spirit it tried to
represent. “That building was about the future,” says Marvin Malecha, dean of the
College of Design from 1994 to 2015. “It was about trying new things.”
Indeed, no ordinary university building could bear the name of John William
Harrelson ’09, the first alumnus to serve as NC State’s chief administrator.
all photographs and architectural drawings courtesy of special collections, ncsu libraries
Brick vs.Stone
“It was fascinating to watch it grow. Everything just sort of went
up like an ice cream cone.” —Ted Halverson ’64
Harrelson was constructed around a concrete corkscrew,
opposite page. Overlaid on the page is the architectural
blueprint for the building. Harrelson stood as a landmark
on the Brickyard for more than 50 years. The photo on
this page was taken in the 1970s.
www.alumni.ncsu.edu 31
john harrelson '09 photograph and architectural drawings courtesy of special collections, ncsu libraries
An overachieving and no-nonsense scholar, Harrelson worked his way through
college by ironing his classmates’ clothing (for 12 cents an hour) and dimming the
campus lights each night at 11 p.m. He rose to senior class president, head of the
Mechanical Society, business manager of the Agromeck and captain of the student
military squad before graduating in 1909. He served in both world wars. Students
knew him, affectionately or not, as “Colonel.”
His namesake building rose at a time when the university, much like the nation,
was staring into a grand future. Enrollment in the early 1960s stood at 6,000, a total
that was expected to nearly triple by 1975. NC State needed a building to handle this
growth: not just the numbers, but the increasingly complex educational world created
by a society that was hurtling quickly into television and computers.
Enter E.W. “Terry” Waugh, a professor recruited to the design school by Dean
Henry Kamphoefner. Born in South Africa, educated in England and Scotland, Waugh loathed the style
of architecture then dominating the American South, which he derided as stale
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Perfect Circles
Of course, there are examples of round edifices that have stood the
test of time. The Guggenheim in New York City, designed by Frank
Lloyd Wright, is one. Buckminster Fuller designed a round house in the
1940s. (Both architects visited NC State at various times.) In Hollywood,
the round Capitol Records Tower stands 13 stories high. And there’s
the Royal Albert Hall in London. Raleigh even has a round hotel, now
a Holiday Inn, near downtown. What about the Roman Coliseum?
Technically, it’s an oval. Not even in the same category with Harrelson.
photographs by doug van de zande
John W. Harrelson ’09, opposite page, was the first alumnus
to serve as chief executive of NC State. He never saw his namesake building; he died of a stroke as he prepared to speak
at the dedication of the new wing of D.H. Hill Library. The
lounge at the top floor had a space-age feel. Opposite, a
cross section of the building.
The ramp leading to the top floor lounge
shows the distinctive ceiling.
www.alumni.ncsu.edu 33
architectural drawings courtesy of special collections, ncsu libraries
imitations of old Charleston, Williamsburg and New Orleans. In his book, The South
Builds, he dismissed the landscape of buildings around him as a “charade” and “a
mockery of the vigorousness of our forefathers.”
Waugh called for a new approach to fit a new world. He spoke of carrying torches
and meeting human needs. For him, buildings could and should inspire the young
minds bubbling inside of them. Showing off his drawings of Harrelson, he described
a “spiral ramp floating around an inner vertical cylinder,” hardly guessing his creation
would one day host shopping cart races. What emerged in 1962, at a cost of $2 million, was the first-ever cylindrical building
on a college campus. The News & Observer carried its picture on opening day, calling it
“magnificent.” The Dispatch, in Lexington, N.C., reported, “State College students . . .
are now becoming acquainted with one of the most unusual buildings on an American
campus, or in the world for that matter,” adding that “from a distance it looks like a
great white cake.”
At the time of Harrelson’s debut, Ted Halverson ’64, of Gaithersburg, Md., was working toward his nuclear engineering degree. He recalls everything else about campus,
and the world at that time, being uniform and rectangular. Suddenly a building with
curves appeared on his treks across campus, offering fresh scenery.
“It was fascinating to watch it grow,” says Halverson, a retired engineer. “Everything
just sort of went up like an ice cream cone.”
Then came the puzzled head-scratching from passing students. It looked like an air
filter or a stack of soup plates. “You heard stories about maybe it was a spaceship,” says
Jerry Johnson ‘67, of Cocoa Beach, Fla., who is retired from the Air Force.
Once students got inside, the novelty quickly faded.
In his math class, Halverson couldn’t see all of the notes written on the curving
When planners realized the stairs and ramps might be challenging, plans were drawn up
for a rectangular addition that would have held four elevators. It was abandoned as too
expensive. Right, Harrelson's curving hallways inside, and steep staircases outside,
were legendary.
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Up and Down
A brochure given out at Harrelson’s
dedication trumpets the building’s
ability to move people. Its central
ramp, coupled with outside staircases, “facilitates fast-moving pedestrian traffic,” the brochure said.
But planning documents show
that, behind the scenes, there were
concerns about so-called “vertical
transportation”—getting folks from
one floor to the next. The architects
at one point looked at adding a series
of escalators, but determined they
were too costly. In March 1959, the
architects drew up plans that would
essentially tack on a rectangular
four-story building that would hold
four elevator shafts, with each elevator having a capacity of 28 people.
The structure was never built, and
Harrelson was left with one tiny
elevator that was initially reserved
for faculty.
www.alumni.ncsu.edu 35
photographs by doug van de zande
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spring 2016
harrelson mirrors photograph by marc hall, nc state; aerial photograph and architectural drawings courtesy of special collections, ncsu libraries
The mirrors in the ladies’ rest room, below,
look like something out of a fun house at
the fair. Inset right, NC State printed pamphlets touting Harrelson’s charms. A few
months before the building was closed to
the public, it was obvious the wooden seats
had seen their share of wear, opposite page.
blackboard—a privilege afforded to lucky students
whose last names started with the right letters in the
alphabetical seating chart. “I had to rely on one of
my classmates’ notes,” Halverson says. “I think I got
a ‘C.’” (The blackboards were later reconstructed to lose
their curves.)
Hatred of the new building grew quickly, spawning a
slew of campus legends, all of them false. Some students
believed that Harrelson was slowly sinking into the ground.
Another story offered the theory that Harrelson had been
a senior project turned in for a failing grade, and that the
student who dreamed it up had managed to get it built out
of sheer revenge.
As the years passed, so grew Harrelson’s reputation as NC
State’s boondoggle — a tag that will follow it to demolition. By 1972,
the first nail was put in its coffin when an annual
report from the Department of History called
it “one of the most unsatisfactory academic
buildings imaginable.”
The list of complaints spanning decades
could fill a thesis, and the disorienting, curlicue
hallways would form exhibit A. A few years back,
during a brief stint inside Harrelson, Mark
Tulbert would often see the same student circling
past his office three or four times within a fewminute span. From his vantage point, Tulbert,
who helps oversee the campus’ performing arts
series, saw helpless wandering as the shared
plight of students. “If they deviated from their
path at all,” he says, “they got lost.”
Harrelson had stairs on the outside of the
building, forcing climbs in 90-degree heat or
freezing cold. The air-conditioning system could
not keep up with the building’s demands and
classrooms were often hot and stuffy. The chairs
all sat fixed to the floor. And the bathrooms? They
formed the nucleus of the building’s shell, all of
the stalls rotating around the center point like
wedges in a Trivial Pursuit game piece.
Raleigh writer Carrie Knowles foolishly tried to use these facilities in roughly
1990, when her husband taught sociology in Harrelson and she was pregnant with
their son. When she attempted to exit the stall, great with child, she got trapped by
Waugh’s attempt at trying new things.
“The only way I could get out was to stand on the toilet. The door kept bumping my
stomach. There was no way to get out of the stall with this giant baby.”
In its defense, with decades of hindsight as a crutch, Malecha notes that Harrelson
Hall may have been a victim of budget-slashing. Maybe, had the building been designed
the way Waugh wanted it, Harrelson might have lived up to its round potential.
But maybe not.
Maybe it demonstrates the chasm between ideas on sketch paper and reality in
poured concrete, a gulf between its designers’ dreams and the demands of practicality. Malecha says he hates to second-guess Harrelson’s creators and offer a critique from
half a century away. But, still, he says, its designers might have added windows in key
photograph by doug van de zande
But on its way
to oblivion, we can
offer Harrelson
some thanks
for trying,
for starting
a conversation,
for refusing
to be dull.
places, giving its users some
sense of direction while they
navigated its innards.
“They became,” he says of
the designers, “too much a
slave to geometry.”
But on its way to oblivion,
we can offer Harrelson some
thanks for trying, for starting
a conversation, for refusing
to be dull. Harrelson veteran
(both as a student and English
professor) Wanda Ramm ’96,
’99 ma has two farewell wishes
for the round building. “I
would like to ride my bicycle
from the top to the bottom,”
she says. “And I would like
to push the button.”
Sorry, Wanda. There is no button. Even in death, Harrelson won’t be giving
anyone the satisfaction of watching it implode. Too many vibration-sensitive facilities
(chemistry labs, a nuclear reactor) nearby. Instead, the building will be taken down
piece by piece and hauled away, its concrete core crushed to be reused in road beds.
Some of the limestone panels will live on—at least temporarily—in the form of
benches that will grace a landscaped spot on the circular site.
But eventually they’ll be gone, too. Plans call for a new classroom building at
the south end of the Brickyard. And, yes, it will have corners.
Josh Shaffer is a reporter for The News & Observer.
www.alumni.ncsu.edu 37