As a UTD design student for nearly four years, I often look around my campus and think, “How can we make this better? Can this be used for multiple purposes? Does it fulfill the needs it was made for?”
Throughout my time doing just that, my rosy-hued glasses on the campus’s brilliance have quickly come off as I observed filled-to-the-brim classrooms, eating areas and living spaces all over our campus. University Housing is subpar, older buildings smell of mildew, and our newer buildings barely give anything to our campus.
The one thing that has stuck with me the most over my many years doing this is the lack of proper spaces to just be. Community spaces are practically missing from our campus. Sure, there’s the Student Union and the occasional seating area if you can manage to find a spot between students scarfing down food before their next class, but it’s not enough. There are also the study rooms, but yet again, across campus, these spaces, along with most free seats on campus, are usually filled. There isn’t enough space for students on campus anymore.
Community spaces for students are limited in such a way that students barely gather together. Worst of all, UTD has a habit of destroying community spaces to make space for its new construction projects. One shining example is UTD’s newest addition to its campus: the Comets LANding esports center.
When Comets LANding first opened, students were required to pay a fee to use the facility’s “top-of-the-line” computers and a new restaurant was opened that did not accept our campus’s ‘Meal Exchange’ program. Most seats in the building are for gaming consoles and the gaming PCs found throughout the bottom floor.
This building’s construction directly destroyed a community space for students to be used for just about any occasion: the old Randy Johnson Mural, a fountain and a seating area. If you were to look it up, all you’d find is a one-to two-sentence acknowledgement on UTD’s website:
This single webpage is what remains of this mural, along with several low-resolution pictures. In 2008, this mural was erected by the artist Randy Johnson, and throughout my first semester of college, I enjoyed studying this mural and sitting next to it when the weather was clear.
To add insult to injury, utilizing the Wayback Machine website unveils another real tragedy — the webpage for this mural has always been a single page, since the page’s conception in 2008 on UTD’s timeline.
Not a mention of any celebration, no information about the artist, and no images of the old mural to remember it — the mural is simply lost to time. Searching “Randy Johnson” on Google will most likely get you the baseball player, or his photography website. Even when I knew what I was looking for, I only managed to find two or three low-quality images of the old mural: one as a link on UTD’s website, and the other on a blog post called “campus encounters” on WordPress.
As a student who walked past the mural many times on my way to class, I understand only now how much I took the mural for granted; it was a pop of color in an otherwise gray landscape of office buildings, showing campus life from the view of its students. I would go as far as to say the mural gave the campus too much credit and color. The UTD of today lacks the color, community and vibrancy that the mural portrayed.
When was the last time UTD students saw any improvement to our campus that actively benefited them? When was the last time our campus didn’t actively feel hostile in its architecture and its attitude towards us?
Our educational spaces are dated, our community spaces are few and far between, and there is a disregard for the desires and comfort of students. UTD should not spend money on an esports building if it meant destroying some of the few community spaces we have left. What good is the Comet LANding when our classrooms and housing fall apart constantly and students are forced to find spaces outside of either to live, work, study and play?
There must be an effort to mend the relationship between this campus and its students through repairing and updating our campus’s assets and revitalizing it with spaces that can be enjoyed outside of work and study. These spaces must be filled with both color and comfort, and designed with all of UTD’s multitudes in mind.
That’s what we need.