Bailey Hall Plaza

Bailey Hall Plaza is one of several large plazas that dot Cornell University’s campus. It lies between the Arts Quad and the Ag Quad. It is a large space, with plenty of room to accommodate the daily flow of people who move through it. It has benches and informal sitting spots, lovely flagstone paving, and even a water feature (which must, of course, be turned off for the cold Ithaca winter). Bailey hall plaza is also one of the most unpleasant spaces on Cornell’s campus. Its interior is too unstructured, and the plaza as a whole is too closed off to act as an effective, interactive pathfinding junction, yet it is too open to the roads that surround it on three sides to be a comfortable resting point. This problem is especially potent in winter, when the bare trees make the space feel exposed and deeply unpleasant. The failures of the space have led to a cycle of abandonment and disregard that further exacerbate the space’s problems. Taken together with the surrounding environ, Bailey Hall Plaza is a good example of urban design failing because it does not reconcile the multiple necessary or potential uses of a space.

A cursory observation of Bailey Hall Plaza during the day demonstrates that people do move through the space. They must. The layout of paths through Cornell all but require walkers to go through Bailey Hall Plaza to go between the two main quads on Cornell’s central campus. Broadly, the plaza in front of Bailey Hall is bounded on all sides into a small district I call the Physical Sciences Backstage. To its west, it is bounded by the physical sciences complex of buildings, Rockefeller hall, and the fenced-off Big Red Barn patio. In the center of the district, to the north of Bailey Hall Plaza, Bailey Hall stands as pseudo-classical monument. It is frequently unused, and its tall stairs and massive columns make it feel inaccessible and imposing. To the east, the Kennedy/Roberts hall complex separates the Physical Sciences District from the Ag quad. To the south, Malott hall acts as a morass of conflicting architectural symbols. It is too small compared to the surrounding structures and roads to feel like a protective or active structure, but it is surrounded by a dry moat that makes it feel inaccessible and distant. All foot traffic coming to and from the Arts Quad must exit or enter the Physical Sciences Backstage district through the Physical Sciences building, or by a heavily trafficked, narrow, walled outdoor pathway that goes between Rockefeller Hall and the Big Red Barn. To access the ag quad, one must either use the steep stairway within the covered gap between Kennedy and Roberts halls, or divert to or from the sidewalk between Roberts hall and the CCC Building to the north. Whichever the route by which one enters the Physical Sciences Backstage district, the only route through the district which is not actively hostile is through Bailey Hall Plaza.1

While there are other destinations which might cause one to deviate from the east-west path of travel between Arts and Ag quads, the primary flow of people is linear. In addition, the space experiences the hourly wave of students that can be expected in any thoroughfare within the built environment of a community scheduled by time block. This brings us to the first failing of Bailey Hall Plaza: for a space which sees a great deal of bidirectional movement, Bailey Hall Plaza completely fails to engage with the commuting users of the space. The plaza is a reasonably sized rectangle. On the three sides that are not taken up by the steps to Bailey Hall, there are Trees interspersed by seven wide pathways. There are a few long log benches placed along the edges of the plaza, but otherwise, the space is entirely structureless. There are no implicit pathways streamlining the flow of people, but also no non-path barriers to slow pedestrians down and encourage them to engage with the space. Instead, every hour students enter the plaza and walk quickly through the space. Some fan out, some clump together, but the tide of individuals is both strong enough, and spread enough through the plaza to make using the space for rest, play or any other purpose uncomfortable. Even simply sitting on the benches can be disconcerting as hordes of students, worried they will be late to class, stream by. At the same time, the structurelessness of Bailey Hall Plaza makes it an unpleasant place to walk as well. It is difficult to move aside from the crowd to wayfind when the crowd takes up the entire plaza. It can be difficult to divert to where you want to go (say, to get to lunch at trillium) if you should find yourself on the wrong side of the pedestrian crowd. Obviously, applying a strict authoritarian design scheme to Bailey Hall Plaza is not the solution; segregating pedestrians and non-pedestrians entirely won’t do, and I would be the first one to advocate for a space that allows members of its community to create their own unintended uses of designed elements. However, Bailey Hall Plaza cannot be subjected to unintended use because there are no designed elements. There can be no desire paths, the entire plaza is stone. Low walls interior to the space cannot be used as benches or climbing objects because there are no low walls. The failure to acknowledge and engage with the nature of pedestrian traffic in Bailey Hall Plaza is only the first of several factors that make the space unpleasant.

On its own, the Physical Science Backstage District’s spatial bounding and flows of people provide a difficult challenge to creating a great space, but these issues are further compounded by the other ways in which the district is used. I term the area surrounding Bailey Hall Plaza the Physical Science ‘Backstage’ because it serves as a home to all the necessary (and perhaps some unnecessary) functions of the physical sciences complex that Cornell does not want visitors to see. All of the buildings between the Arts quad and the Ag quad, as well as the buildings on the north and west sides of the Ag quad, receive cargo deliveries via loading docks in the Physical Sciences Backstage area. This means that there are roads, which need to be big enough to accommodate large delivery vehicles. Two of these roads constrain Bailey Hall Plaza on three sides. Garden Avenue flanks the Plaza to the east, and Sciences Drive lies to the west, before curving around, following the southern span of the plaza, and ending in a T-Junction with garden avenue. In addition to the delivery pads and the roads that access them, there are several parking lots that are either on or accessed by Sciences drive and Garden Avenue. The copious roads make the entire district feel car-centric.

The car-centricity of the roads surrounding Bailey Hall Plaza is an unfortunate and difficult to rectify issue, given that the surrounding building need delivery access, but the poor design of the roads makes the problem worse. Sciences Drive, in particular, is far wider than a two-lane road needs to be, and contains no traffic control features. This makes the street feel like a collector/distributor road to both pedestrians and vehicles. The vehicles take this as permission to go faster than they otherwise would, and pedestrians don’t feel comfortable using the asphalt like they would a truly safe, local road. While cars and trucks are moving through the streets at moderate speeds, there are a series of perpendicular parking spaces either on the roads or attached to them. Together they give me the sense that the Physical Sciences Backstage district is more like a poorly designed Walmart Parking Lot with particularly reckless drivers than a truly mixed-mode campus space. A plaza could provide a site of solace to pedestrians traveling through even a district dominated by bad streets. Unfortunately, Bailey Hall Plaza does not do this.

Bailey hall plaza does not effectively protect pedestrians from the traffic of the surrounding district. First, it can only be accessed by crossing roads at the poorly designed intersections, but the difficulties of the pedestrian don’t cease when they enter the plaza. The aforementioned openness is the first problem. It makes the plaza feel like it would be just as accommodating to cars as it would be to pedestrians. This problem is compounded by the wide and numerous entryways. Together these features give the sense that bailey hall plaza is more an extension of the surrounding road than an independent plaza. This problem is even worse in the winter, when the small strips of vegetation cease to act as even a minor visual barrier to the surrounding roads. The issue of trees brings us to the final problem of the space: Bailey Hall plaza was not effectively designed for Ithaca’s climate

In addition to the lack of non-deciduous visual protection from roads, there are several other problems suggesting the designers of Bailey Hall plaza failed to account for details of Ithaca’s climate. First, the plaza’s main visual point of interest is a large water feature that runs part of the southern edge of the Plaza. As Ithaca has an unpredictable freezing schedule, this feature must be turned off relatively early in the fall and remain off until late spring. This deprives the Plaza of a main point of interest for much of the year. Finally, the benches on the edges of the plaza are constructed from two large, sealed-timber blocks pushed together and have not weathered the freeze/thaw cycles in Ithaca well. In fact, the maintenance crew has so given up on their good order or even usability, that they have started using the benches to pile snow cleared from the plaza.

Bailey Hall Plaza, located in the Physical Sciences Backstage district, lies within a context that presents both numerous challenges and numerous opportunities. The Plaza’s design falls prey to the challenges and thus fails to take advantage of the opportunities. Bailey Hall Plaza is located at a crucial junction on campus but does not use its location to either promote the speedy flow of traffic or to encourage spontaneous interactions. It is surrounded by roads and parking and is dominated by those uses. One can imagine a different design, where Bailey Hall Plaza fulfills the competing needs of the community. Unfortunately, it does not do so on this campus, and, in its failures, demonstrates the importance of clear thinking on how to make a great place.