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Brown Facilities management announced Friday that the SciLi will be adding gargoyles to the outside of its 14-story tower just to lean into the whole misery and doom thing.
“The SciLi has this brand that’s already very strongly felt by everyone here – miserable brutalist spaceship fortress,” project designer French Diamond said. “At this point, we need to embrace it it so we’re adding these very menacing gargoyles.”
“The core tenets of this project and of the Sciences Library itself," continued Diamond, "Are misery – the acute anguish experienced in the building – and doom – the foreboding aesthetics of the building itself. The gargoyles improve both those areas, making the building more outwardly intimidating in appearance as well as more oppressive to the STEM students doing problem sets inside, because they know we are trying to scare them with the gargoyles.”
President Christina Paxson has publicly praised the renovation efforts. “The SciLi is an important center of misery, dread, and isolation,” Paxson wrote in a campus-wide email. “The planned gargoyle renovation is going to be a great opportunity for the campus community to feel bad in this building.”
At press time, the design team was considering making the gargoyles’ eyes follow you wherever you go.
