Burdell’s Building Bracket: Sweet Sixteen

With the later round coming up, we’re doing them in one fell swoop. With the Sweet Sixteen, you’ll see Central, North, East, and West in that order. Let’s get back to business.

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Welcome back to the biggest little bracket challenge anywhere in the business. For a refresher, here’s the bracket: Tech Buildings.pdf. After a long four day break, it’s time for us to get back to business.

Jake Grant

Sweet Sixteen:

Center Campus:

No. 1 Lettie Pate Whitehead Administrative Building (Tech Tower) vs. No. 4 Fred B. Wenn Student Center

Tech Tower:

This one is self explanatory, so I won’t mince words. There’s sixteen illuminated letters on the top, and one of Tech’s most prized-but-unlawful traditions is to take the T closest to the highway, in order around the tower, until they are all gone. Tech’s oldest building is worth a history column on its own, but nowadays houses gorgeous administrative offices, thanks to a recent renovation. Tech would not be the same without its crowning icon, which remains the de facto, if not de jure height limit for buildings on campus.

Student Center:

Soon to be Tech’s newest building, Wenn and its complex hosts such icons as Tech Rec bowling, Under the Couch, the Tech ballroom, the Post Office, and, of course Chick fil a, the greatest eating establishment known to man, except for all the better ones that are, ya know, off campus. But, as far Tech goes, it’s near the top.

No. 2 Andrew Carnegie Library vs. No. 3 Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons

Carnegie:

Financed with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation to serve as Tech’s first library, it was very quickly full to the rafters with books. Now long since replaced by Price Gilbert and Crosland from its original function and home to the President’s Office, it houses some of the more elegant space on campus. The building is small, but a gem of an architectural asset buried in the nook between Tech Tower and Highland Bakery, the outpost also known as the ghost of Junior’s Grill past. Notably, the Class of 1903 fountain is quietly located just outside of the front door.

CULC:

Did you know The Internship was filmed here?

North Campus:

No. 1 McCamish Pavilion vs. No. 13 Jesse Mason Building

The Thrillerdome:

This is one of the places that need no introduction. Even the most casual of Georgia Tech fans have, for the most part, visited McCamish Pavilion. Built as Tech’s first true basketball arena, replacing the Heisman Gymnasium, the Armory, and the elegantly named Crystal Palace, McCamish is also notable as the face of many of Tech’s larger formal events, like Senior Capstone, the Spring Career Fair, and Graduation.

Mason:

The rather tall home of Civil and Environmental Engineering has an absolutely beautiful renovated first floor, if not a rather utilitarian exterior. Oddly, since it was built more recently than when Tech became co-ed, it doesn’t have both a men’s and women’s bathroom on the top three floors, instead choosing to alternate genders and floors.

No. 3 Russ Chandler Stadium vs. No. 15 Joseph H. Howey Physics Building

The Rusty C:

Another old favorite to many readers of this site, the site of Russ Chandler Stadium at Fowler and Ferst has been, in some form or another, the home of Tech baseball since they stopped sharing space at Grant Field with football. With Phase II of the modernization of what is already one of the best fields in the sport coming, one of the most dramatic settings in college baseball, bracketed by Atlanta skyline, is idyllic, iconic, and historic, and about to become even better.

Howey:

I couldn’t dedicate a whole history column to one of my low-key favorite minor traditions at Tech, but here’s as good of a place as any to talk about it: I love all the hometowns written in the cracks between the bricks of the walls of the Howey Lecture Hall bathroom. I think it’s really cool. I have no idea how it started, but it’s charming. It’s a little thing to feel a part of, especially for someone like me that was a freshman from farther away when he first found it. Probably isn’t a coincidence that the aesthetic of my favorite deep dish pizza place in Chicago is largely based on the rampant vandalism that covers every wall. But that doesn’t stop Howey from being a bland, windowless building shoehorned with four lecture halls for all the physics, math, and computer science lectures almost everyone needs to take but absolutely no one loves.

East Campus:

No. 1 Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field vs. No. 4 William H. Glenn Residence Hall

Bobby Dodd:

The number one seed in the east campus bracket needs no introduction, but you’re getting one anyways. First home to Georgia Tech Football as early as 1905, the former ravine with a creek in the bottom was flattened by prisoners John Heisman had contracted from the local penitentiary. Though Tech didn’t make the Flats its permanent home until 1913, after bouncing around between mainly Piedmont Park, an actual park, and Ponce de Leon Park, a baseball stadium, the now-graded Grant Field was supplemented by spectator stands built by Tech students. The Hill lorded over the west side, and a baseball stadium graced the far end of the field. Later on, stands would follow on the east side, before the stadium was bowled in along North Avenue and the Naval Armory and Heisman Gym and Pool conplex were built along the north end of the stadium. The stadium, home to four national championship teams, lost its bowl during the dark years in the back half of the 20th century, while the Edge Building, Rice Center, and the mammoth Upper North Stands and Football Offices replaced the Works Progress Administration-era basketball and swimming recreation center as the calendar marched into the 2000s. Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field, as it is now known, remains Tech home to this day, as the oldest on-campus facility in FBS football.

Glenn:

As you’ll probably realize, I seeded Glenn and Towers like this for the thrill of the potential second round matchup. However, Harris and Hopkins share similarly intriguing prospects in a matchup. Anyways, the story of Glenn is incredibly similar to the story of Towers, just this one is a little less close to a dozen lanes of the Downtown Connector.

No. 6 Marion L. Brittain Dining Hall vs. No. 10 Judge S. Price Gilbert Memorial Library

Brittain:

Almost every aspect of this building was design, made, and installed by a Tech student, from the architecture, to the stonework, to the wrought iron details. Perhaps the most elegant example of Collegiate Gothic in the sole bastion of the iconic look on campus, Brittain Dining Hall’s biggest flaw is probably its irregular hours. The building is gorgeous, the lawn it sits on is idyllic on summer days, and it is centrally located. That it is named for the Institute’s contemporaneous president is even more fitting, as he was a great champion of both Tech politically, physically, and economically, all while making great strides to improve the education and student life on campus, as seen through his legacy in programming, the physical plant, and the chapel-like dining hall that bears his name.

Price Gilbert:

It seems almost unfair to rank Judge S. Price Gilbert’s namesake, especially against the newly renovated Crosland Tower, while it awaits completion of its own makeover. However, it is undoubtedly true that the building, now over half a century old, was ready to be remade and refreshed, and the ongoing process is fortunately well underway. When it was closed, though, the stairwells were narrow, the rotunda in front of the original façade was largely unnecessary, and the building was overcrowded with students displaced from the closed tower. However, it was quietly consistent, reliable, and always had working staplers, among similar small details, which is something unappreciated until it is gone.

West Campus:

No. 1 Campus Recreation Center vs. No. 4 Manufacturing Related Disciplines Complex

CRC:

The Campus Recreation Center is the second building of this purpose to be built on this site. The original, the Student Activity Center, was decommissioned after the turn of the millennium to make way for the expansion of the McAuley Aquatic Center, whose temporary stands were razed, shrinking capacity fivefold to roughly 2,000, while a fifth and sixth floor, including six basketball and volleyball courts, a running track, an indoor soccer court, and exercise rooms, were floated in. The leisure pool was permanently enclosed, while the workout floor, racquetball courts, and climbing wall were dug in on the back of the SAC footprint. The facility remains one of the nicest in the country, as well as being the best pool in the country.

MRDC:

Odds are, if you ever toured Tech as a student, alumnus, or parent, you’ve been to the MRDC. Since it is the home of the Invention Studio, one of the country’s original and leading makers’ spaces, it, more than most other things, is a strong selling point and clear demonstrative visual when talking about the attention Georgia Tech pays to the practical application of theoretical classroom concepts. Personally, I believe this is a critical part of making a good Georgia Tech engineer, and so I’m happy to spit that line out almost word for word from Institute, though the Montogomery Machining Mall is subtly a much more impressive collection of technology. When viewed from the air, the story goes is that it’s intended to resemble a motor, though from the ground, the large, extraneous concrete cylinders encasing all of the wings just look kind of weird.

No. 2 J. Erskine Love Jr. Manufacturing Building vs. No. 3 Joseph B. Whitehead Student Health Center

Love:

The Love Building, like its older sibling, the MRDC, is a split affair between Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. The atrium is one of the more stunning architectural features on campus, and whoever has the second floor office overhanging the main lobby is quite lucky to be sitting in all that natural light. Unlike most current Tech architecture, it isn’t overdone and excessively postmodern, but rather more like the next logical evolution of the vernacular brick style, like how Tech has a variety of styles, current to the time in which they were built, from Victorian to Gothic to Modern to the present day, always with the uniting bands of red brick.

Stamps:

I try not to let my personal vendetta against Tech Dentistry bias my opinion here. It’s a new, affordable enough, and reasonably easy to use. Other than that, I don’t have much bad to say or much else good to say, either.

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Eight more bit the dust in two days when we roll onto the Elite Eight. Anyways, leave your thoughts and comments below and look for the next round Saturday Elite Eight.