I was on the Rensselaer campus yesterday. I first visited there in 1981, when I was deciding if I wanted to apply to the school, I spent four years there as a student, I visited for various reasons during the late 80s and early 90s, and I taught in the (now defunct) preservation program there from 1999 to 2008. I’ve only been there once since then, so this was the longest I’ve gone not being there in almost 40 years.
Downtown Troy faces the Hudson River at the head of its navigation. Rensselaer is on the bluff at the top of the river valley, east of downtown. It wasn’t always there: for about 40 years most of the school was in the “Main Building” which was at the bottom of the bluff, near downtown. Then the chemistry labs were moved out into a building called the Winslow Laboratory, then the Main Building burned, then more buildings were built further and further east as the campus gradually crept up the bluff. When I was a student, the Winslow building was all but abandoned, used for dead storage, despite its status as the oldest building on the campus.
One of my earliest projects after starting up OSE’s predecessor firm was to investigate the condition of the Winslow Building, which was on the brink of being demolished. In 1993, I went inside it for the first time, found that it was structurally sound – the exterior brick ornament needed some work – and wrote it up. The building was fixed, used for a while as a children’s museum, and is now back as part of the school.
I took the picture above yesterday. The lab was built in two phases, and the different color brick pretty clearly shows the joint. Given that it’s Troy and December, the snow is not much of a surprise. Seeing old projects is always good; in this case I got to revisit two past eras of my professional life at once, even though I was there for a completely different reason.
