By Steve Schultze and Andrew Wall

Guest Writers

Calvin building projects throb giddy in the pockets of faculty and students and administrators - blue arrangements of faith and finance that plunge eastward, steely groans already signaling their erection. Puritanical specters give Calvin a distinctive charm, after all, that grim familiarity whispering paranoia with wild eyes and compulsive doorhold upon compulsive doorhold (upon). And that's community, for you, or at least the puritanical sort. His lust remains ours, yes, always, as one free hand moves hastily to hide our own modest, ever-incipient, tumescence - a gesture that yet haunts our identity: we are what we conceal. Know cities by their sewers - not by their arcades - and, especially as we heap salmon brickwall unto His greater glory, it becomes all-the-more pressing to examine and, perhaps, violently overexpose the elisions which, pulsing deep beneath Calvin's circuit of pathways, inform and exceed our lived identity.

Knollcrest campus sprawls over a network of subterranean tunnels - an underground arabesque tensed from building to building, pumping distilled connectivity among them; its covert flood of power, data and heat prefigures any visible structuration: it thaws frozen pathways and students trace its caress, buildings sprout where it flows, its current immediately initiating any given edifice to the broader discourse of the Calvin community. Sociality demands informatics, it seems, and only when lightbulbs hiss pure factuality for our convenience do buildings come into their own as the concretions of identity - as symptoms of the raw impulses supplying the very possibility for congregation. Power, light, heat, telephony - without these, Calvin wouldn't survive (at least not in this country), wouldn't even exist; students and staff perform their everyday tasks presupposing an infrastructure that remains submerged: conduits prefigure the edifice complex, continue to supply it with action-potential, but are ultimately excluded from community experience - are repressed by the massive quasimodern travesties they enable.

The brittle accretions of flow, structures offer themselves as habitation, to be worn, to become extensions of their occupants: a venue for all social interaction. Tunnels, however - always peripheral to the lifeworld of students and faculty - pose a continual threat to the visible complex; their pulsions speak the primal dependences of structuration: tectonic rhythms reveal the congealment of flow inbuilt every walljut, every doorslam. Calvin's buildings endure as stations of this savage dialectic: designer William Fyfe offers us a neurotic architecture, living spaces whose startling homogeneity effectively bolsters campus identity against its substructural affliction. Sweeping brick planes and dirty gravel roofs - we know exactly how far Calvin extends along clearly demarcated lines of safety: hexagonal webs keep us from falling too far. Visitors stumble into an insoluble maze of tulips or snow or mortar, as escher staircases buckle underfoot and doorways retract into the smug sheets of eyes, peering, with gleeful mockery, from every side - every corner window, every skyway overlook: others don't have a chance, thank God - we're all informatic objects but at least natives know the choice vantage points. Calvin's architecture inscribes not only its identity, but also the myopia necessary for its survival; it's paranoiac architecture. As Benjamin Hoekstra convincingly argues in his Oct. 20, 2000 Chimes article (``Architecture makes voyeurism a pleasure at Calvin''), windows overlook windows, voyeurs watch voyeurs, diffusing panoptic a self obsessed gaze that brings students and staff to keyhole themselves, compulsively - a furious autology to consolidate ego against the flux within, beyond.

Narcissism is predicated on maintaining the current sociosymbolic regime (or vice versa). Buildings ooze administrative consciousness, which functions by doubling back on the community that grants it authority, in the first place, in order to subject it to its stark utilitarianism: ``Minds in the making,'' slung across our walls and lampposts, makes explicit this agenda, whereby all faculty/student engagement is reduced to production value - or, properly, efficient reproduction of a normative identity: the administrative ``mind,'' always already the plump synecdoche of edifice, is to be ``completed'' (as any extension) - churned out, batch after batch of shrinkwrapped Middle Managers for Christ. Ghosts of the ancient Administrator claim new construction projects for the Phallus, overestimate the ``spiritual renewal'' from WTC, lamenting indignant that fiery dual climax as a tragic blow to the NY skyline (and to Administration, as such; to international business) even as the bodies and debris are sucked back under shimmering pools of opaque, giltvoiced postproduction: they fail pathologically to consider indignation's own fetish-character. Faculty and students, on another hand, flex between their lifeworld - campus as an experienced identity and subidentity, both - and the administrative-puritanical Phallogos; their Knollcrest engagement provides a medium for Calvin's utterances - as puritanical, as connective - both to itself and to the greater community (of Grand Rapids, of American academia).

The tunnels, while submerged, articulate themselves through the lifeworld of students and faculty - that is, of departments, the convergence zone for non-administrative denizens, who remain, categorized by scholastic discipline, within the sway of administrative-structurative consciousness. The unique character of each academic subdivision arises from their necessary and specific location within the edificial matrix: the extent to which a department is infused with underground connectivity is written on both its discourse and local structuration. To crawl through the tunnels, themselves, is uninformative - dank, cold, inarticulate - and speaks nothing of their originary significance for the school; if we examine, on another hand, the limit cases of proximity and remoteness, we're wellpositioned to identify symptom with determinative force.

Basement dwellers subsist in the draft of subtext - without windows, fluorescent flickering slowly driving them to the brink of light, fluffy hysteria: the voyeuristic autology is unstrung, to some degree, when perspective is replaced by painted brick - the panoptic stasis of identity shattered, and the informatic object, and the masturbatory subject. Art majors hardly enjoy an identity of their own, really - largely unable to form intelligible sentences, anyway, relying instead on an incoherent, frankblack warble to perform such everyday social functions as ordering pizza or squabbling over the ventilation shaft. They're moved by the ``spirit'' (or ``genius'' or whatever), the irreducible existential moment of creation, of appreciation, while ``Challenging our conventional ideas of space'' becomes the token-statement of their staunch refusal - inability, perhaps - to explain their bastard uncreations; becomes a single, prolonged justification for the preponderance of ``concept art'' among graduating BFAs. With the work of Ippel and Poole, specifically, plate tectonics meet discursive exercise to accent delirious impracticality against the structurative-adminstrative preoccupation with efficiency: mohorovicic jouissance speaks the preconditions of all architecture. It's no coincidence that the office of the president lies two floors above, nor that the Calvin chapel - whose great, steel-reinforced prick salutes the heavens, in perpetuam - squats on the node between Hiemenga, Spoelhof, and DeWit Manor. It's here that the conflict comes to a tee, dialectical negativity crashing headlong and releasing a vicious spike of hyperstructuration - lastditch displacement shielding Byker from the nihilists that line his haussmann throne: They wouldn't dare to cock their barricades against him; not with the Lord's house so awkwardly conspicuous - an inflamed teat offered to that numinous desiring-machine, whose mouth craves flow just as much as any breast.

And so Art majors hardly enjoy an identity of their own, and join, in their seismic fury, their fellow subterraneans of the Geology department - indeed, another inarticulacy, but here a relic of administrative paranoia: tucked in a corner of the vast Science-Building-North-Hall compound, a proverbial motherload of ferroconcrete pins it subsurface - to smother it, to drown it in semiotic flow: the draconian vestiges of Young Earth haunt all Calvin's natural sciences - from biology to chemistry to accounting to physics - but none more aptly than Geology, poor sods, whose research directly threatens Administrative doxology. The draconian vestiges - and so we sever and store all codemongers in one convenient structure, which, with the ascendancy of computer science, has ripened and even sprouted a trinity of glistening steel phalli to complement its telescopic scrotum - our very own, residential Deadeye Dick, keeping vigilant over good ol' John ``Doc'' Dee-Vries. Any residual pre-economic code is swept under four full floors of the Hekman library; the CIT wobbles on the threshold between waves of binary whitenoise and cliffs of electronic denotation: they fondle the school's cyberstatic capillaries on a daily basis - four floors are just enough, its uppermost dangling limp, prepared to barter (at a moment's notice) its flaccidity for an extra story.

Directly across the adjacent parking lot poses the seat of Calvin articulacy - an automotive minotaur, removed from campus both topographically and geologically: the FAC sulks in isolation, its subterranean umbilical shorn by a stubborn partition; the tunnel that stems from the library basement towards the new construction site veers suggestively to the FAC, only to terminate mere steps from its foundation. Although in many ways its structure resembles the chapel's - the torus frame, the Pizza Hut roof - the FAC flaunts its castration with two trenchant ironies: first, whereas the chapel attains to a celestial apex, its twin (would-be) brandishes but a nub; the FAC, largely cut off from subterranean flow, is already a hyperstructure, already superfluous. Second, while the chapel's interior visibility attests to the clash of informatic object and masturbatory subject, the FAC manages to bifurcate center and circumference via the closed, central auditorium. The importance of this detail is underscored when we consider that the outlying rooms are dominated by part of CAS and all of the English department, many of whose class-sessions become extended exercises in verbal selfgratification, its students having long ago rejected the subtler discursive considerations of ``relevance'' and ``coherence'' in favor of anecdotal ritualism; the auditorium gyre pushes masturbatory subjectivity to the perimeter. Discussion reaches fatal perfection as the speechact turns back on itself, makes of itself an object, and slides with all utterances down the asymptote of linguistic instrumentalism. Pure efficiency - nothing misspent, the market of the absolutely hyperinflated sign continually bolsters (to an ideal) its own stagnant identity; the FAC impels neurotic discourse - its students and faculty caught in an administrative-edificial snare: removed from campus life, the remnants of student-faculty connectivity meets the threat of objectification with a paranoiac impulse for selfmastery, the ``anecdote,'' which, while initially consolidating selfidentity, quickly loses denotative specificity in unremitting propagation - a permanent echo, whose latest iteration speaks neither the first nor the last term, but always only the fact of echoing - gradually comes to signify nothing but the structure, its model of articulation. The FAC, shut off from the connective flow of the Calvin underground, manages to bifurcate center and circumference via the closed, central auditorium: towards hyperstructuration, the FAC approaches the triumph of panopticism: dissipation - a foreclosure on significance in the absence of drive force.

Departments have coped differently with their respective breaks from the Calvin lifeworld. While English continues to baste the paranoid imaginary of Chimes and Dialogue - whereby Calvin speaks itself without itself, just squeaking by, these days, with scandal sheets and photo documentaries of its self-obsessed memes - CAS has escaped its FAC identity by exploiting a structurative-administrative oversight: personnel exceeds space - parking, office, shelf. CAS delegates, therefore, have scattered throughout the edificial matrix; faculty have colonized entire wings of both the library and the science-building - core engagement zones that restore the department (more or less) to the college body, to its role as custodian of all things interactive. It suffered through the FAC only to shatter its limitations and articulate a new departmental identity - diffused yet involved, diverse, open; they sacrificed their fine-arts refuge to embrace widearmed the challenges, the encounters, the discussions that lie beyond a consolidated office suite.

CAS has opened itself to the flux of connectivity from within the administrative network; it infuses its excess throughout edificial consciousness and reconfigures the edificial matrix: we reach East campus on the back of Communication Arts and Sciences, whose goatboy “stepping” finds itself already inscribed in structuration. The newly-assembled bridge is a trope of this ambivalence: on one hand, it manifests the triumph of the underground, the Beltline tunnel irrupting magnificently over four solid lanes of traffic, polished connectivity exposed for the world to see; the genius of CAS articulates itself, here, with a spike of orgiastic antiproduction that ensures heat, power, and light to the new campus extension. And yet, even as it connects, the bridge exposes the final perversion of subterranean flow: flow as edifice, visible flow, structurated flow – flow co-opted by the edificial matrix. The bridge, even as it links, forever attests to the disconnect necessitating a bridge in the first place. It reveals CAS excess while reminding us that CAS (and all excess, every creation) always remains, and can only be articulated within, the administrative-structurative complex. CAS broke from the FAC and gave itself to informatics – in one way, consummating its own scholarship – but inevitably remained within structuration, inevitably returned. Now the new barons of our own pocket orientalism, its eastward drift teaches us the limits of creation within hegemony – finite creation; teaches us that, inevitably, our hearts are structural; our souls are consumed by structure; all our persons are the property of edifice; and even as we bring structure to its beyond, we, in effect, merely return to it that of which we had robbed it.