The Seeley G. Mudd Center
Mudd is home to Oberlin's Main Library, CIT, the Computer Store, AV, Oberlin College Archives, Special Collections, and administrative and technical offices for most of Oberlin's library system.
It is located at 148 West College Street, at the west end of Wilder Bowl.
There's a rumor that a feminist architect designed it to resemble a vagina. Regardless of whether or not this is true, it does kind of look like a giant, cinderblock vulva.
There's an another old rumor that the building is slowly sinking into the ground because the architects didn't account for the weight of the books that it would hold. It and Ray English were even on NPR. But it's just a rumor, and is said about many libraries across the country. It's got a space on the library's Questions That Never Die board [1].
[edit] Academic Commons
The Academic Commons in Mudd was a project completed in the summer of 2007, and opened on August 28. The installation of the Academic Commons included an extension of operating hours of Mudd (i.e., the stacks) to 2AM on weeknights (Sunday through Thursday).
[edit] Who was Mr. Mudd?
From the Questions That Never Die board, answered by Ray English 18 May 1992:
- "Seeley G. Mudd was a well-known California physician and medical school teacher who also had a lot of money. Among other things, the Mudd Foundation helped fund library buildings at a number of colleges. Mr. Mudd's picture is hanging on the wall by the photocopy machine." [2]
[edit] External Links
- Mudd web site
- Interview with Ray English on NPR about whether or not Mudd is sinking
- " Scenes from a Library", video by Jonathan Wall and Marty Sulkow filmed in Mudd
- "Code" was the final phase of a 1997 collaborative student project by Tiffany Calvert, Haakon Faste and Scott Gaynor, in which the face of Mudd Library was obscured with binary code as part of an exponentially growing time-based series of serigraph prints. A 1998 hybrid painting/sculpture by Faste is part of library's permanent collection on level 3.
