Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet: P

Prince Lucien Campbell Hall (all photos by me)

This is the next in my Eugene/Architecture/Alphabet series of blog posts, the focus of each being a landmark building here in Eugene. Many of these will be familiar to most who live here but there are likely to be a few buildings that are less so. My selection criteria for each will be threefold:

1. The building must be of architectural interest, local importance, or historically significant.
2. The building must be extant so you or I can visit it in person.
3. Each building’s name will begin with a particular letter of the alphabet, and I must select one (and only one) for each of the twenty-six letters. This is easier said than done for some letters, whereas for other characters there is a surfeit of worthy candidates (so I’ll be discriminating and explain my choice in those instances).

This entry’s selection begins with the letter P, for which my choice is Prince Lucien Campbell Hall.

Prince Lucien Campbell Hall
It was clear to me during my years as a student at the University of Oregon in the early 1980s that few among the campus community regarded Prince Lucien Campbell Hall with affection. Being both a high-rise—the 10-story structure was by far the tallest building on campus until the construction of the Bowerman Tower at Hayward Field—and an anomalous modernist design sited on the Memorial Quadrangle, “PLC” was particularly derided by my fellow students in the School of Architecture & Allied Arts. My guess is the level of animus has waned somewhat, as the passage of time and the acquisition of patina have softened some of the building’s hard edges. Additionally, PLC’s eventful history has become the stuff of UO legend, perhaps contributing to its acceptance as an iconic piece of the campus fabric.
 
Architects Glenn Stanton and Keith Robert McGuire, both graduates of UO’s architecture program, designed Prince Lucien Campbell Hall to provide substantial office space for university faculty, classrooms, and a large auditorium on a limited footprint. Named after the fourth president of the university, construction of the building occurred in two phases. The first, consisting of the five-story south wing and two stories forming the base of the future west wing, opened its doors in 1963. The second phase, completed in 1968, realized completion of the 108-foot-tall slab-like tower along Kincaid Street as well as the auditorium (now the PLC 180 Hyflex 2 Classroom).  
 

View from the Memorial Quadrangle.

Given its mid-century provenance, it isn’t surprising Stanton and McGuire worked within a modernist idiom, specifically the International Style, which eschewed historical forms in favor of simplified shapes and the adoption of glass, steel, and concrete as preferred building materials. PLC stands apart from its neighbors around the Memorial Quadrangle by virtue of its absence of ornamentation and asymmetrical massing.
 
The large English oak trees on the east side of PLC help give shape and form to the Memorial Quadrangle while also somewhat mitigating PLC’s bulk. The university planted the trees in 1940, so they would have been forty years old when I was in school, and perhaps much less substantial than they appear today.  
 
The incorporation of brick and colored tile on the façades does help PLC harmonize with the other buildings, as does setting the tower back toward the west edge of its site. In my opinion, while this aspect of its design works well on the quadrangle, the unrelieved form of the tower as seen from the west is its most objectionable attribute. This is exacerbated by the scaleless repetition of the graph paper-like composition across the entire façade.  
 

West façade. 

I alluded to PLC’s eventful past. One memorable event occurred in October of 1970, when someone planted and detonated a substantial amount of dynamite (estimated at between 20 and 24 sticks) in a ground floor restroom. While no one was hurt, the destruction was substantial, including burst plumbing and damage to four adjacent restrooms and ten offices. The Eugene Police and the FBI never found the perpetrator or perpetrators, and while researching for this blog post I could not find anything about the possible motives for the blast. This was the era of escalating student demonstrations during the Vietnam War, so perhaps the bombing was related to those protests.
 
PLC has unfortunately also been the site of multiple suicides. Desperate individuals have leaped to their death from the building’s highest balconies. Undoubtedly due to this tragic history, there are tales of people seeing ghostly figures at the top of PLC, experiencing chills, or feeling as if they are being watched when no one is there. According to Folklore Flags (a UO student-run project to connect folklore back to the context of place) the elevators in the building “are where some of the creepiest experiences have happened, especially when riding them alone and at night. Phenomena include hearing voices and whispers, feeling breath on the back of one’s neck, and feeling something brush against one’s body.”
 

"The Falconer" statue by James Lee Hansen.

In 2008, someone stole “The Falconer” statue from its pedestal in the courtyard on the Memorial Quadrangle side of PLC. The work of sculptor James Lee Hansen, the abstract bronze was donated to the university by Jordan Schnitzer and installed in 1974. My research suggests that it was never recovered, but I did find it (or a reproduction) sitting on its pedestal; see my accompanying photo (if someone knows this is the original, let me know).
 
Unlike many of my schoolmates and laypersons, I don’t think I ever disliked Prince Lucien Campbell Hall as a piece of architecture. It is a competent example of the International Style, which was the prevailing design philosophy of its time for institutional and commercial buildings. I view it now through rose-colored glasses, with fond memories of my time at the University of Oregon and the classes I attended within the building.