The Osaka Maritime Museum was designed by Paul Andreu and opened to the public in 2000. It is a steel dome structure, built on reclaimed land in the Bay of Osaka. It houses a maritime museum and is centered around a replica of an Edo period trading ship. Osaka City supported the design and built the museum as a way of reflecting the city’s maritime history.

The museum is 15 meters from shore and is accessed by a submerged tunnel. Its offices and entrance are located nearby in a semicircular building located on the land.

One of the most impressive aspects of the building is its comprehensive structural resistance to wind, water, and seismic forces. For this design it won a Structural Special Award in 2002 from the UK Institution of Structural Engineers.

In 1982 the French president François Mitterrand announced a national design competition for this monument. The Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen’s design won the competition, and construction began in 1985. Paul Andreu was Spreckelsen’s associate when in 1986 Spreckelsen resigned and Andreu took over the project. For the next three years Andreu oversaw the design and construction of the arch.

The arch is shaped like a cube, with sides of length 110 meters. It is situated at one end of the Axe Historique, a line of monuments running through Paris. In the middle is the Arc de Triomphe and at the opposite end is the Louvre. Unfortunately, rail lines and tunnels forced the supporting pillars of the arch to stand slightly askew from the axis of the Axe Historique. However, it does reflect a slight skew in the Louvre at the opposite end.

In Spreckelsen’s design, the arch was built not as a tribute to any military victories. Instead, it was designed as a monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals. It was inaugurated in 1989, two hundred years after the French Revolution.

One of Paul Andreu’s most important works was the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing, in China. Construction on the steel-framed semi-ellipsoidal center began in 2001, and was completed in 2007. This work would become one of the staples of his life’s work.

Building requirements in Beijing dictate that no building can be higher than 46 meters, the height of the Great Hall of the People. Since so much space was required for a work like the NCPA, it uses a huge amount of underground space, stretching to 32.5 meters below surface level. The NCPA is surrounded by an artificial lake, which is kept at a mild temperature by circulating in groundwater from the Yongding river which flows through Beijing. The Yongding river flows underground beneath the NCPA and provides enough buoyancy to support an enormous amount of weight. This buoyancy supports the entire structure of the NCPA.

Paul Andreu had great admiration for China and worked on a number of projects for the country. This work was the crowning achievement of his works for China and one of the most remarkable of his career. The location of the hall, near the Great Hall of the People, Tiananmen Square, and the Forbidden City, signifies the magnitude of the responsiblity entrusted to Paul Andreu.

Andreu justified the placement of such a modern building in a place with such important Chinese architecture by the importance of Beijing in the modern world. Moreover, he designed the building in a way that was intended to complement the surrounding architecture, not to distract or detract from it.

Paul Andreu (1938-2018) was a French architect who was well-known for designing a number of airports in the . He designed the largest airport in France (and second-largest in Europe), the Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris. Located in Roissy-en-France, it is also known as the Roissy airport.

The airport design and construction began in 1966 and was completed in 1974. Paul Andreu oversaw this design and its subsequent expansions.

The original airport consisted only of what is now Terminal 1, a tall circular hub surrounded by seven satellite buildings where the gates were located.

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The ten-story central building has an impressive design with its overlapping bridges between floors.

In subsequent years the airport was expanded and more terminals were added.

In 2004, a part of Terminal 2E, which had been added in 2003, collapsed and killed four people.

The collapse was apparently due to some technical issues, combined with too little margin for error in the safety design. The collapse naturally upset Andreu and prompted a break in his work.

This is my last blog post and I cannot miss the place that has been the most meaningful to me during my time in college, and perhaps during my life.

When I first came to college I knew no one. The first weekend in Norman some friends in the community I would soon be a part of welcomed me and one, who quickly became my first friend at OU, invited me over to his apartment for lunch on Sunday, the day before classes began. His apartment was in building G of Traditions East. His girlfriend and her friend’s apartment was right above his. But the apartment that would become the most important to me was at the other end of the building. I did not really know any of those residents yet. I had been introduced to a few of them, but that was it. A week later we discovered that one of those residents was in my English class. Another was the leader of my small group. As the semester went on I got to know these two well, through studying some great English literature and through studying the Bible. Soon enough I came over to their apartment to study English. Then I began to come over occasionally to socialize, and got to know the other residents.

As a few of us freshmen were coming more often to hang out at that apartment, the residents one day decided – let’s have an open-door policy! For the rest of that year I half-lived in that apartment. I grew to be friends with others who came and others who lived there and we slowly built a group of friends that was remarkable not only for its closeness and kindness, but also for its openness and quickness in accepting new members. And there was the remarkable feature of a front door that remained open 24/7 – a gesture of hospitality well-backed by the residents’ quickness to provide space, friendship, food, and comfort to any in need.

Through this apartment I began to realize the importance of a space in building community. With a couple of others who had also benefited from that open apartment, I moved into Traditions East the next year – and got the apartment right next door! We were quick to also adopt an open-door policy, and our next-door double open apartment set up became a well known feature among all our friends and broader ministry community. I also put a lot of care into how I arranged the space: what furniture we had and where we put it, making spaces for people to socialize or for people to study or for people to hide and read. We who had been hosted so much the year before learned from how that apartment had benefited us and applied it in hosting others.

The next year I moved in to the apartment which had first opened its doors, as roommates shifted around. I had the chance to live for a year in the now well-known and established hosting apartment. Again, putting in work to make a welcoming atmosphere was where much of my effort went in arranging that space. Again and again we hosted social events, meetings, and anyone who just needed to be around a wholesome community.

I have since moved off-campus to a larger apartment, where we still have an open-door policy, though it is not quite the same. Looking back on my time in Traditions (whether visiting or living), one of the things that impresses me most is how much happens in little, generic spaces. I worked at the Traditions apartment complex for a long time, and I have seen a lot of identical apartment spaces. Some are nice, many are fine, and some are quite repulsive. This would have appeared as an average fine or nice apartment (depending on the day); but any time spent in it would make it clear that it was no carelessly maintained, neglected space. So much of the character of a place is determined by what goes on in it, and how much people put into it. We took an average apartment and made it an excellent spot. We found a use for every inch of space, showed plenty of attention to the provided furniture, decorated the ceilings and walls, and channeled the light and the views through the windows. As I observed in Cate Main, I also observe here – it’s really the little things about a space that make the biggest difference: those things which affect the intangible components in the experience of a space.

It took about half a semester, but during my freshman year, up through its demolition in the spring of my sophomore year, Cate Main lounge was one of the most important places on campus to me. It was the place where my campus ministry met to pray every day, and gradually it became a central location for many friends from that ministry and tangential groups. It is one of the primary locations that I remember forming friendships and having meaningful conversation in. A couple of my friends practically lived there freshman year, and I began to spend many hours there as well. Located in the same building as the Cate Main cafeteria, with our meal exchanges, we were well-equipped to live there out of our backpacks, working at the tables, eating, and napping on couches.

The lounge was wide (the above picture looks across the width), but was also very long. Despite a piano, ping pong table, pool table, and plenty of furniture (four couches, five or six armchairs, and three or four tables), most of the room was open space. Two walls were covered in windows and glass doors, allowing for plenty of indirect lighting. The windows looked out onto a garden/lawn/sidewalk area in front of the Honors College, a building just as aesthetic as the rest of campus buildings, and with a little more charm to its shape. The doors opened onto a patio, hedged in by bushes, with a few picnic tables. Right outside the windows was the main sidewalk between the dorms and class buildings which would fill with students between class periods and subside to its usual quietness during class periods. The building itself was located very conveniently near class buildings and near the dorms.

The impressive thing about Cate Main was this versatility and convenience, combined with an interior that made it easy to use the space to socialize or work, without disturbing people doing the other. The piano was also an excellent addition. It was somehow well-tuned during all my time in college (and last I checked, it’s still doing well at the bottom of Walker Tower!), and the musicians among us, or sometimes strangers, would often provide music in the background. Because the space was so large and carpeted, it was always easy to hear clearly, but rarely too loud.

But however much Cate may have added to our lives as students, the university’s employees making decisions about buildings did not feel so warmly toward it. The outside they probably considered ugly (as evidenced by the fact that it is currently difficult to find any pictures of the building online). They disliked how the sidewalks narrowed to that one passageway by the building. They did not have a high opinion of the Cate dorms the lounge was meant to service. Many of the advantages students found in it were not perceived from the outside. There were no flashy whiteboard rooms. There was no fancy-looking-but-actually-just-uncomfortable studying furniture. There was just empty space in an inconvenient spot, with a few old pieces of furniture and a piano. Who was it doing any good? And maybe they were right and it was the best decision for the university as a whole. But we well knew its value, and felt its loss when in March of 2018 the furniture was removed and over the following months that part of Cate Main was destroyed.

We never found a good replacement for the Cate Main Lounge, and it’s only reasonable to expect that we had an unusually good place in Cate. The perfect fit that it was for our community, and the lack of value perceived in it by the university, reflect the fact that some of the most important components of a space are not among first the things one would consider when evaluating it. This has made me think more in recent years about what it is that we really desire in a space, room, or building. It’s not often the fancy things, but rather the things which affect the intangible components in our experience of a place.

The OU Clocktower has had some special significance to me since a certain Saturday a week after finals week Freshman year. That day I walked around campus, taking pictures of different spots, buildings, and statues. It was a nice day and our campus was beautiful as ever so as I walked around reflecting on the end of my first year of college I decided to take some pictures.

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One of the places I came to was the clocktower. I knew the legends about it: how walking under it means you graduate late (which apparently was never a risk since I’m graduating late anyways!), and how walking under it and looking up means you never graduate (still definitely avoiding that one!). So maybe that gave it some significance when thinking about the years passing in college. Maybe it was also simply that it was a nice structure, and a convenient one. Whatever the factors were, somehow as I took pictures there an idea came to me.

I don’t know if I had already decided I ought to come back and take pictures at the end of every year, but if I hadn’t yet, I decided to that day. And when I came for a walk on campus I would take a picture with the clocktower. In fact, I would take pictures from a number of different sides, depending on how far I was into college. Taking these pictures would be a way of looking back at college, seeing myself at different times, with the clocktower as a sort of landmark which might not change much, but would reflect the years of my time in college and signify those walks on campus at the end of every year.

I wasn’t as used to taking or posing for pictures freshman year, but I was already getting better. The one that year was taken from the south side of the tower.

In subsequent years I was not so good at going for that walk soon after finals week. It often got pushed back into the summer. My sophomore year I took a summer class during the June session and on July 5th, during my last weekend in Norman that summer, I went for my second end-of-year walk. That year I took pictures from the south and west sides of the tower.

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In junior year I did a little better, taking the walk and pictures on May 23, 2019. That year, instead of wearing my normal dark blue/gray t-shirts, I was wearing a special shirt I’d just gotten that semester. In the spring semester I had been in the Auden course, an intense but incredibly rewarding (intellectually, not on paper) Letters course taught by the professors from History, Classics, and English. I was joining a good friend for this second part of the course, and she was a student in Creative Media Production. She created a class t-shirt that was adopted and given to each student (the majority of the design is on the back).

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When classes went online in the spring of 2020 and I began to work from my apartment in Norman, the spring and summer began to blend together. There wasn’t quite a clear dividing point as there had been in previous years. Nonetheless, on the Sunday before the last week of the June block of summer classes, I went on an end of year walk on campus for the fourth time. Again, I came to the clocktower and took pictures. This time I took one from the east and had a picture from all four sides.

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The clocktower at OU signifies time, progress, and the graduation goal of college for many students. This sequence of pictures carried some of that significance for me, but also signifies the ends of my academic years across college.. It has also been a landmark of my life every week passing between the library, physics classes, math classes, and other parts of the academic life that I have loved at this university.

I’m not sure yet what I’ll do when I walk around after I graduate, but I’m sure it will include some sort of exciting fifth shot of the clocktower: perhaps from underneath looking up!

The OU library has been, off and on, one of the most important buildings for me in the last four years. In it I’ve spent many hours working in groups, doing homework between classes, Skyping my family, cramming long final papers, studying Old English with my professor, and even playing games and having adventures with friends.

Naturally, I’ve spent a lot of my time on the first basement level and the ground floor. But one of the most important places I’ve experienced this building has been on the second (or first, if you’re British) floor in the old section of the building. I saw it when I toured before enrolling at OU, and shortly after coming I went in search of it: the Great Reading Room.

This room is a beautiful work which well deserves its title. Its lights are visible from outside the library at night. Inside the room its lighting, its finish, its shape and scope, and the generations of dissertations on the walls inspire admiration from visitors. Some people walk through to see it. Some people sit down to work – but it is, as a rule, totally quiet. Opening a backpack is an awkwardly loud business.

I prefer more noise when working, so I have not used the Great Reading Room often. But occasionally I have ventured in there to think or to write, and I well remember one day – a football game day – freshman year when I went there to work on a paper. I did not get a lot done on the paper (it was not very interesting), and instead walked around the area. Just across from the entrances to the hall are the Stacks: an area in the old section of the library consisting of old, semi-transparent floors with shelves and shelves of books (many very old). The low ceilings, rickety metal stairs, long rows of shelves, and florescent lighting add to the eeriness of the Stacks. There are plenty of ghost stories about them on campus.

I walked around this section for a while, particularly on the basement floor. There I found many very old works which caught my interest: theologians, philosophers, and the rest. There were condensed in that area some of those long-dead writers whom I most respected. There were books there published as long ago as the early-to-mid 1800s. There were far more than I was going to be able to read (indeed, to this day I have read few of them). It was an awesome experience to see that wealth of knowledge lined up before me. In a time where I was choosing the direction for my life and studies it was also a humbling and enlightening, timely experience. After long perusal and wonder, I returned to the Great Reading Room where I wrote about it to a like-minded friend.

It was a good experience because of the authors and the books, but also because of the fascinating eeriness and grandeur of the aged building that held them. Every part of that work of architecture contributed to the mood that inspired such awe and respect for the wealth of knowledge contained therein.