Ashley Takacs | Giving a good first impression?

As I walked to class last Friday morning, I was abruptly shaken out of my 10 a.m. stupor by a series of CNN trucks and secret service vehicles blocking my path to the Fine Arts Library. I looked up to hear students buzzing about Vice President Joe Biden's visit and thought to myself, Toto, we're not in Buffalo anymore. Unlike back home - where a visit from the Doobie Brothers is front-page news - Penn is a wonderful place where big-name celebrities and politicians come to speak on a regular basis. Just in the last week, for instance, we've hosted Maya Angelou, the vice president and Madeline Albright. Unfortunately, we don't have an equally "wonderful" place to host them.

While I was excited by the prospect of Biden being on campus, I was hardly enthused about the idea of him speaking at Irvine. Luckily for Biden, Irvine isn't his only impression of Penn - his daughter is a graduate student here. But for most important speakers who are whisked down Walnut in a motorcade, Irvine will be their first, and most likely last, impression of Penn. And frankly, I don't think the medieval-esque auditorium is what we want representing our beautiful campus.

To put it bluntly, Irvine Auditorium looks like a kindergarten class went wild with tempera paints (as one comedian who performed during my NSO noted). The color scheme would be more at home on Sesame Street than Locust Walk. The design of the building is equally inappropriate. The soaring ceiling height (while impressive to be sure) makes hearing difficult - the irony of an inaudible auditorium had to have escaped the Trustees who approved the project when it was built in 1926. David Brownlee, in his book Building America's First University jokingly describes the ceiling as demonstrating "the force of the black holes of outer space even before they were discovered."

Penn students have long tried to make sense of Irvine's unusual design. Over the years, these hypotheses have been passed down and transformed from mere conjecture to campus legend. The myth tells of an architecture student given the task to design an auditorium for his senior studio project. Obsessed with Mont-St-Michel, the church on which Irvine is loosely based, he came up with the awkward design for the building. His design received a failing grade (and justly so), and the student was barred from joining the illustrious rank of architects. After finding success in another field, the embittered student returned to the University and offered to donate the funds for a much-needed auditorium - contingent on the use of his failed senior-project proposal as the basis for the design.

As it turns out, the story is untrue. Brownlee's book explains that the layout was the unfortunate result of meddling trustees who wanted to use a square plot of land (generally auditoriums need rectangular spaces), and a towering spire that would be visible from across the Schuylkill. While the rumors are debunked, the fact that the building merits such a tale remains a testament to its absurdity.

The story has even survived the building's renovations in 1999. During this time, the University poured millions of dollars into restoring the decorative finishes on the walls (as a campus landmark, they did not want to change the original design) as well as modifying the acoustics and adding rehearsal spaces. Artists undertook the painstaking process of restoring the paint to its historic (albeit tacky) grandeur. The University still derives much pride from the building, though - as many prospective students learn on their campus tour, Irvine houses the eleventh-largest pipe organ in the world, and Diana Ross once fronted her Supremes on its very stage.

Considering all of this, bulldozing the abomination is out of the question. Like the eccentric aunt who wears over-the-top feathered hats to her church socials, we must bear the embarrassment of her presence - even if it means that embarrassment occurs in front of the vice president.

Ashley Takacs is a College junior from Buffalo, N.Y. Ash Wednesday appears on Wednesdays. Her email address is takacs@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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