Creative harmony resides within Humanities

Like a walled medieval city, the Mosse Humanities building’s imposing gray edifice conceals several distinct neighborhoods of academic and creative endeavors.

With its confusing entrances and lookalike hallways, the 1969 building is perhaps better known more for its fortress-like exterior than for what goes within the seven-story building.

Afro-American Studies Professor Tim Tyson knows firsthand the building’s challenges. As a candidate for a faculty job in 1994, his first visit to Humanities was an experience “in the twilight zone,” he says. While waiting in the Afro-American Studies office, then located in Humanities, Tyson excused himself to use the restroom before delivering a talk.

Emerging from the basement bathroom, fear soon gripped Tyson as he become increasingly confused by the long hallways of identical doors and floors. He was lost. Five minutes passed, then 10 minutes, and then Tyson panicked.

“I began to weep a little, thinking “I’m going to be unemployed ? this is my only job opportunity,’ ” Tyson recalls.

He decided to flee the building to re-orient himself. A grad student in the search party for Tyson glanced out a window and spotted Tyson outside.

Afro-American Studies has since moved to Helen C. White Hall. “They should call it the “Inhumanities’ Building,” Tyson says.

Originally, the campus wanted three buildings to house art, history and music. Chicago architect Henry Weese instead designed one 532-foot-long structure, an Escher-inspired maze that connects its creative neighborhoods, with dim alley-like halls. Student majors, faculty and staff spend the most time in the building, but this semester, a total of 19,752 students are enrolled in the 749 courses assigned to meet in Humanities.

Humanities is still home primarily to art, history and music, and the structural discord of the building gives way to a certain harmony among occupants and their facilities, ranging from the Gamelan room that houses Indonesian percussion instruments to large kilns used by ceramics students on the top floor.

For example, on the first floor, home to the School of Music’s 111 practice rooms, the hallways reverberate in a symphonic convergence of large groups and individual students rehearsing or honing skills.

Closet-sized practice rooms cluster in stubby halls off the dimly lighted main corridors. For performances, three large halls host concerts and recitals. Outsiders might never find them, but other rooms house a recording studio, a music technology lab, and the Instrument Collections and Repair Room, a sort of library for musical intruments. Paula Kinne, a sophomore majoring in music education, works there, keeping instruments in working order for the UW Marching Band and music classes, among others.

Kinne, who would like
to become a music teacher, repairs a clarinet. A complete overhaul can take

up to seven hours. Surrounding Kinne are shelves with dozens of tiny drawers containing tiny replacement parts for instruments, such as rods, screws and valve springs, bow hairs for string instruments and mouthpieces. She says she’s always learning new intricacies of the instruments as she helps keep them in working order.

Justin Richardson, facilities manager for Humanities, schedules the classes, rooms, rehearsals and performances for 300 music undergraduates and 150 graduate students. Richardson also oversees setup and staging of concerts. “It’s different every day, but that’s why I like it,” he says.

Music Department administrator Ann Larson says a daily array of Humanities performances and recitals is too often a secret. “Few people know about the number of incredible free concerts we offer, which often include relatively famous

people,” she says. “The people here are incredible musicians, but the concerts are not well attended.”

Upstairs, the sounds of music are replaced by the sights of art. On the seventh floor, the Art Department’s creative community of 475 undergraduate majors and more than 135 graduate students work in classrooms equipped for ceramics, painting, metal work and more. “I think people don’t really know about all the equipment and artists and things going on in the department. It’s somewhat hidden,” says art professor Elaine Scheer. “The building is definitely not the ideal space, but the students and the department use it well, using every square inch allowable.”

The department produces a wide array of art to fill the seventh floor gallery. Exhibits change each week, showcasing both graduate and undergraduate work, or art exchanges with other schools.

José Rodriguez Lerma, an MFA student, plans to make the gallery itself his exhibit. Lerma is sanding down sections of the walls to reveal various textures and layers of old paint, a technique he calls negative painting. “In essence the project is a collaboration of people who have been here and their work ? a record of all the various installations that have occurred here.”

Like an archaeologist, Lerma says removing the layers is a metaphor for accessing the past. “This place has a lot of history,” he says. “There’s a connection to people you know, and people you have just heard of.”

Department chair Jim Escalante says the building’s perceived shortcomings are balanced by advantages. “What’s most unique is our proximity to the Elvehjem,” he says. “For the department to have access to that quality ? it’s a remarkable asset.”