UMass Steps

I pass this building each day I attend my physics class at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, across the Connecticut River from our home in Northampton.

It's UMass's flagship (main) campus, and it is large, with about 27,000 graduate and undergraduate students (plus a small, indeterminate number of auditors like me). This large concrete building--about as soulless as they come--has a wide plaza that you see, and an equally extensive one on the other side; neither one ever seems to have many students crossing it--they pass by, as you see on the left.

There are more human-scale buildings, many in the characteristic brick of the region; my class meets in one of them. But on the whole the university offers an awkward architectural mix.