(This isn't a statement about what football is or isn't relative to academia. That is another issue, and frankly I am tired of it. If people gave a fuck about education in this country it would be less expensive than it is now. In any case, I believe you get out of education the effort you put into it; if that means being an autodidact or coming up empty, so be it.)
The building is a $70 million abomination, albeit a beautiful abomination, at least on the outside, where its lines are superb. In that regard it is a magnificent work of art.
But that is where its beauty ends and, unfortunately, poor taste takes over. Because I don't believe football was ever designed to be a frilly thing, the frills inside this building are comical.
On the inside the building is a garish travesty that highlights the bad taste often associated with ostentatious displays of wealth and fashion. Think of all the assembly-line paintings you'll find inside the corporate offices of a multinational insurance company, where the receptionist wears a beehive coif and the CEO looks like Donald Trump in a bad tie.
It's like that.
Its interior has the quality of a badly curated museum. Its tawdry affectations betray an empty-headed consumerism, kitsch, and paint-by-numbers design.
Striving for edginess, it came out mundane.
Even the rugs are ugly.
If I were the architect I'd be pissed because a team of idiotic interior designers ruined my perfectly beautiful masterpiece. At least he didn't acquiesce to placing a big yellow O on the facade, though I'm sure somebody would have thought that a good idea.
The building is overkill, but it is overkill in ways that you may not appreciate. College football as a corporate endeavor entered the pantheon of excess long ago. With that comes the misbegotten hubris associated with this building, the equivalent of a Napoleon Complex.
It's silly.
"Over-the-top" isn't a good enough phrase for this stinker.
If I didn't like football, i.e., care for the game rather than its accouterments, I'd pooh-pah the whole deal, like many critics indeed have.
In fact I am likely not alone thinking this--the chances are Oregon's football team, coddled as it is, will forget to come to play a few times this season.
The first time a team comes into Eugene and dresses on the bus before slipping out of Autzen with an upset because a few Oregon players couldn't pull themselves out of the players' lounge in time for kickoff--that'll be the day we acknowledge the truth:
The Oregon Football Psyops Center is a joke, and the over-marketing of the Oregon brand is embarrassing.
TS
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