Courier

Media Credit: (Left) Courtesy of Shatford Library, (Right) Elizabeth Piedra The Horace Mann Building (left) prior 1933. The C Building (right) is built over its ruins.

The Horace Mann Building was the epitome of opulence for Pasadena Polytechnic High School.

The building was unto itself a view, grabbing the gaze of onlookers from Colorado Boulevard to its seemingly meticulous attention to detail and craftsmanship.

Atop the structure's sat a glass-coated dome that leaked in traces of sun into its vast hallways and kept the building in mood with the weather.

Acting as the structure's arms and surrounding a curving landscape which made up a horseshoe-shaped courtyard were the Louis Agassiz Building to the east and the Jane Addams Building to the west.

In 1933, the Long Beach Earthquake brought all of this to its knees. The Sexson auditorium alone survived amongst the rubble and bore witness to the edification of the replacement C, E and D Buildings that would be the face of present day Pasadena City College.

"[Architecture] can stand for hundreds of years and it can tell people in the future about what was going on in the past and I think that's an educational experience," said professor of architecture Neiel Norheim.

"People can look at all these different buildings and they can see what was going on in different eras. It's almost like learning history," he said.

Norheim, who studied in Europe prior to landing at PCC, found that his strolls through the claustrophobic alleyways of European cities were to watch time slowly reverse its course and pedal forward seamlessly as he ventured further.

"Walking through these medieval streets was really gratifying in the sense that you would walk through them and you would feel as if you were walking through different periods of time," said Norheim.

For Library Director Mary Ann Laun, who has been at PCC for 29 years, those medieval alleyways can be found snaking in and around the L Building, the site of the old campus library.

"I called the campus "urban ugly" because there was cement everywhere and where there wasn't cement, there was ivy," said Laun, recalling PCC's own architectural dark age of the late seventies when landscape ran unchecked and vermin sprung at staff and students alike.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools