University at Albany, The Campus Rockefeller Built

The University at Albany is not a new school. Founded in eighteen forty-four as the New York State Normal School, it is one of the oldest public universities in the country, established to train teachers for a rapidly expanding state education system. For most of its first century it was a modest institution in downtown Albany, serving a regional function without much national profile.

That changed under Nelson Rockefeller. When Rockefeller became governor of New York in nineteen fifty-nine, he had an ambition to build a public university system that could rival the University of California. Albany was one of his signature projects. He brought in architect Edward Durell Stone, who had designed the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, and gave him an essentially blank check and a former country club's worth of land on Washington Avenue.

What Stone produced was among the most controversial public campuses in American architecture. He organized the uptown campus around a central spine, with colonnaded podiums, linked buildings, fountain pools, and four residential tower clusters arranged with a rigorous formal symmetry. It opened in the mid nineteen sixties. Critics called it monumental and inhuman. Students over the generations have been more ambivalent: the campus is genuinely impressive from certain angles and genuinely bleak from others, particularly in Albany winters when the wind crosses the open plazas without interruption.

The university today enrolls about seventeen thousand students. Its atmospheric science department hosts one of the leading weather research programs in the country, which makes geographic sense given Albany's position at the convergence of several regional weather systems. The nineteen oh nine downtown campus on Western Avenue still stands and houses some university functions, a more human-scaled Victorian counterpoint to Stone's modernist megastructure.