Friday, September 17, 2010

McConaughy Hall Demolition


McConaughy Hall, a glass-enclosed, circular, two-story pavilion on Wesleyan's campus, was demolished this summer and replaced with a grassy slope. The movie below consists of a series of still images I took during the demolition (higher resolution video). The soundtrack is "The Great Unknown", written and sung by Dar Williams (and used with her permission). Williams is a Wesleyan alum who undoubtedly ate many meals in MoCon.

The University decided to demolish MoCon because it could not find any suitable use for a building which was expensive to maintain. President Roth wrote in his blog posting about his decision , "The building just didn't accommodate the needs we had, or, if we tried to make the structure fit those needs, it became just too expensive."

The University has posted McConaughy Hall: Generations of Memories, which includes many photos, as well as a listing of some of the noteworthy events held in MoCon over the years.

3 comments:

dmitri said...

cool video, I tried to watch it on youtube and it returned a malformed link error. when I searched for mcConaughy Hall, no results...
could you post the url of the link in the comments here please?

Stephen H. Devoto said...

Several different size versions of the video are available here:
http://gallery.me.com/fishmuscle#100036

Spinoza said...

The hi-res versions are upside-down/inverted. That was actually an interesting perspective.

It might have been worthwhile to keep the underground portion, perhaps as storage, and still have a terrace above.

I like the bicycle in the foreground. Was that yours?