The Ohio State University: Main Campus Architectural Splendors

The Ohio State University: M a i n C a m p u s A r ch i t e c t u r a l S p l e n d o r s By: Michelle Leitstein

Introduction: Buildings are built and torn down all the time on a college campus. There are a lot more patterns here on The Ohio State University campus in the architecture, than I am used to seeing. The patterns on campus bring to life a sense of order in what seems to be a chaotic place. There are students all around on campus rushing from class to class, there are walkways in a seemingly random design, like on the Oval, and there is always someone doing something, eating, walking, laughing, studying, etc. no matter where on campus you find yourself.

The way the patterns are organized and imbedded in the architecture intrigue me because as life moves everywhere around the buildings, they stay in one place, mostly unchanging, for all to see in its stationary beauty.

Being from a small town in New Jersey, the architecture on The Ohio State University campus is very different to what I am used to seeing at home. I hope you can look at and see these beautiful architectural designs the way I see them.

Artist Statement: My photo essay on The Ohio State University’s campus architecture is intended to make students choose to open their eyes to the significant and seemingly insignificant places on campus and see things in the architecture they had not seen before. My intended audience is Digital Media Composition (ENG 2269) and the Ohio State University students. This influenced my decision to do a project on campus architecture because all of the architectural components that I captured with my camera are of places students have seen or will see on campus.

My purpose was to inspire students to appreciate the beauty of campus architecture and to help them see things that are glanced at but not seen. I wanted students to see the flowers carved out of the side of the building that frame the doors outside of Hagerty Hall and recognize the golden flowers on the stadium. I achieved this by editing the pictures I took in Photoshop CS2.

This project is an online photo essay, so it can be seen by anyone. The materials I used were a digital point and shoot camera and a laptop for Photoshop. When taking my pictures, I utilized rule of thirds to emphasize patterns and textures. I got up nice and close to the buildings to take different approaches and to the way things looked. By getting close to the buildings (right up against the buildings), I was able to emphasize the size of the buildings and the texture of the materials they are made of.

Choosing to use my digital camera enabled me to take better and clearer shots of the building than if I had used my phone’s camera. I would like to have used the latest version of Photoshop as was available to me in class, but it was not as easily accessible for me outside of class, so I used Photoshop CS2.

I approached my subject with an idea of what I thought students completely ignored or just briefly glanced at when they walk around on campus. At first, I was going to utilize old family pictures, but since my audience is comprised mostly of the Ohio State University students, I changed my theme to campus architecture. As I walked around on campus, I discovered things I would have never seen if I was not looking for it. The picture of triangles that comprise a rectangle and go up the side of a building is a part of the stadium. I had not even noticed it at. The staircase that makes a crisscross pattern was inside of the stadium. I had a friend with me and she pointed that one out.

Doing this project helped me understand that pictures put together in a way such as this, can make a statement that emphasizes the drawbacks of looking without seeing which is a significant problem in today’s society.

My vision for the project was to take campus architecture and remove the color. Then, I was going to add some filters, but I decided to play around with the saturation, highlights, mid-tones, and shadows for some of the pictures first. After doing so, I decided that for most of the pictures taking the color out would be a detrimental mistake as the colors make the images memorable and feel like a more true representation of the buildings.

I succeeded in my goal because the way I enhanced the images provokes thoughts like, “Where have I seen that before?”, “Where was that taken?”, and “I cannot believe that is on campus!” Some of the composing skills I used from class were using filters, cropping, and coloration.

The technologies I used were Photoshop CS2 and a Sony Cybershot T-99 camera. Photoshop allowed me to edit the pictures to a close representation of what I envisioned in my head of the final product for each picture and the camera allowed me to get close up to the architecture with more clarity than I would have gotten using my phone’s camera. The only thing I was constrained by was Photoshop CS2. I do believe the result would have been similar, but I feel that the newest version has a lot more tools I could have utilized.