University of Minnesota east bank

The east bank (Mississippi River) of the University of Minnesota is home to most of the buildings on the large Twin Cities campus. It is allways under construction. EE/CSci building is there.

The east bank is not the west bank, which has the neglected arts (buildings as well as programs) hard times, and Walter library... despite the fact that most CLA classes are on the other side of the river. The two sides are connected by a bridge over which you may walk or ride your bike, but way to many people just ride the campus connectors. The east bank also has films, a big aluminum can called a museum, and crazy people who yell in the mall about god.

The West bank, which is not the East bank, also contains the new Anderson Library Archive Center, which is a 2,500,000 cubic foot, environmentally-controlled cavern with two buildings built inside of it, which are also environmentally-controlled. The two buildings give the archive center ~185,000 square feet of space to store volumes, with room to expand.

The archive center is now being used to store some of the older and less accessed volumes from the University's 5,000,000+ collection of books, newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, as well as other forms of media, such as blue-prints and photographs.

The cavwern itself can house up to 1,900,000 volumes on 26,000 shelves. There are actually two caverns which were mined out of the sandstone on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Each cavern is 600 feet long, 65 feet wide and 23 feet high.

There is also a building on top of the cavern which houses special collection, small exhibits, and allows patrons to peruse and inspect items from the archives. The entire cavern is also encased in a water-protection "jacket" which would allow the building and all the volumes to survive a 500 year flood.

The entire project totaled 46.5 million dollars, with 38.5 million coming from Minnesota legislature, and 8 million from the University.

And as a side note, the shitty-ass, should-be-abandonded art "building" (if you can call it that) is going to be replaced in the next few up-coming years, much to the joy of the artists on the west bank.

The "aluminum can" mentioned by GeekSnap is really the Weisman Art Museum, which was built in 1993. It looks more like a crumpled up ball of foil to me, but it is really a practice run by Frank Gehry for the design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The Weisman Museum is covered in a silvery, metallic skin and has lots of geometric shapes, which are actually dormers and cupolas, with windows and everything, sticking out at odd angles from the building, letting in asymmetrical swathes and arcs of sunlight. The building overlooks the Mississippi River, and is visible from both the East Bank and West Bank campuses.

(I realize this should probably have its own node.)