Burdell’s Building Bracket: Elite Eight

HOW IS HOWEY STILL ALIVE AND WELL IN THIS TOURNAMENT? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THAT AT ALL. Anyways, now that that shouting is out of the way, happy Monday to all of you and enjoy this Elite Eight, which it seems is less chalky than the last round, somehow. With Price Gilbert and Mason out, Brittain and Howey become the Cinderellas to watch here in the regional finals.

Welcome back to the biggest little bracket challenge anywhere in the business. For a refresher, here’s the bracket: Elite Eight.pdf. After a hectic weekend trip, it’s time for us to get back to business. It is now officially crunch time.

Jake Grant

Elite Eight:

Center Campus:

No. 1 Lettie Pate Whitehead Administrative Building (Tech Tower) vs. No. 3 Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons

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.

CULC:

Did you know The Internship was filmed here?

North Campus:

No. 1 McCamish Pavilion vs. No. 15 Joseph H. Howey Physics Building

Somehow, Howey is still here. But I’m here for it.

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.

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. 6 Marion L. Brittain Dining 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.

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.

West Campus:

No. 1 Campus Recreation Center vs. No. 2 J. Erskine Love Jr. Manufacturing Building

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.

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.

Three more votes, including this one. Will Howey continue its thrilling run? Will Brittain finally run out of luck for its grind-it-out, narrow-but-unsuspecting style? And which shiny West Campus building will face...probably Tech Tower...in the penultimate round? Voting closes Thursday, April 4th at 9:00 PM, see you on Friday for the Final Four. And be sure to check out the long-awaited return of Yellow Jacket Roundup elsewhere on From the Rumble Seat today!