In the popular mythology of the Sixties, few episodes loom as large as the
SDS-led student takeover of Columbia University. On April 23, 1968,
protesters seized five buildings and under the scrutiny of the world
brought
a distinguished
university in America’s largest city to a
standstill. For a week, a picturesque gallery of characters, including Tom
Hayden, Mark Rudd, and Stokely Carmichael, erected barricades, ransacked
offices, issued communiqués, and held interminable meetings. The
occupation culminated, as was surely intended, in a rather brutal police
action, but by then it had already become one of the mythic events of that
turbulent decade. Now, on its thirtieth anniversary, a curious symposium
was held at Columbia to take stock of the event—or, more
precisely, of one part of the event:
the relationship of the Columbia takeover to architecture.

At first glance, architecture seems like a logical lens for looking at
1968. After all, the Columbia unrest was to some extent architectural in
origin; that spring longstanding student anger at urban renewal and the
destruction of nearby black neighborhoods boiled over when the university
began building a new gymnasium in Morningside Heights. Furthermore,
during the course of the takeover, the only professional school
to be
occupied was Columbia’s architecture program, housed in Avery Hall, in
which the anniversary symposium was held. This architectural aspect of
the protest had an international counterpart in Paris, where there
immediately followed the May protests which, among other things, resulted
in the abolition of the