{"id":3064,"date":"2016-05-01T10:43:11","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T14:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.alumni.ncsu.edu\/?p=3064"},"modified":"2024-02-01T15:39:32","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T20:39:32","slug":"heres-to-harrleson-1962-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/2016\/heres-to-harrleson-1962-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s To Harrelson 1962 \u2013 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Josh Shaffer<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

For more than 50 years, Harrelson Hall has loomed over the Brickyard like a flying saucer on stilts\u2009\u2014\u2009a circular freak of a building that flummoxed students with its spiral ramps, windowless classrooms and ductwork that whooshed like a subway tunnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It spawned horror stories from students who wandered lost inside its cork-screw hallways, craned their necks to see equations scribbled around curving blackboards and struggled to make sense of restroom stalls shaped like pie slices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It inspired ridicule and pranks as much as scholarship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four agricultural engineering students drove an MG Midget up the ramp in the late 1970s. Skateboarding in Harrelson became an unofficial sport at NC State, as did roller-blading, shopping cart riding and Super Ball bouncing. (A video posted on YouTube \u2014 just search for \u201cHarrelson Hall\u201d \u2014 captured 2,000 balls bouncing down the ramp.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Harrelson\u2019s long reign as NC State\u2019s best-known oddity has expired, and the demolition date is drawing near. As the campus says goodbye to this misfit of a building, a curious fondness is emerging for the structure, which will be reduced to a heap of rubble this summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its construction did, after all, grow out of a burst of 1960s energy, a period of daring that launched the space program and urged a crew-cut-wearing nation to grow its hair into a Beatles mop. Harrelson\u2019s designers believed architecture played a vital role in shaping and improving human life, giving it zest and originality. For all their mistakes, those minds earn posthumous marks for effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harrelson was constructed around a concrete corkscrew. Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, NCSU Libraries<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To understand Harrelson, it\u2019s important to remember how the campus looked prior to 1962, when the building opened its doors to students. In that era of conformity, much of NC State looked like a place that spared every expense on its buildings, churning out rows of bland brick boxes and leaving the fancy stuff to Chapel Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And today, a few still offer a tribute to Harrelson and the inventive spirit it tried to represent. \u201cThat building was about the future,\u201d says Marvin Malecha, dean of the College of Design from 1994 to 2015. \u201cIt was about trying new things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n