A lot of the buildings on Texas A&M’s campus are ugly. Really ugly.
Whether you come to know that on the first day you tour campus, your first day of class or a month into your time here, this is the inevitable realization that all Aggies must have.
There are a few exceptions, of course: Zachry is kind of cool-looking and the Academic Building is at least different, but the rule generally holds. It’s intuitively clear to everyone — except maybe the completely insane — that the cost of A&M’s buildings isn’t just paid in the price tag, but also in having to look at them and have our senses of aesthetic decency defiled.
Maybe I’m being a little bit dramatic, but there’s truth to the idea that not all costs are born in the price of a building — or the price of most things, for that matter.
What am I talking about? Negative externalities: costs which are by nature not born by those making a transaction but rather an uninvolved third party.
A common example here is pollution. Sure, a factory may be gaining a private benefit from producing toxic chemicals, but it is nonetheless imposing a massive cost on the people downstream who will get cancer 10 years later.
A&M’s buildings are similar to — although far less insidious than — these cancer-causing factories. They impose a hidden cost upon their viewers even though they themselves may cost less money nominally, thereby actually increasing their overall costs.
This is obviously very difficult to quantify. How could we attach numbers to the displeasure of seeing Blocker every day?
The truth is that we can’t assign a specific value to that discomfort. Nonetheless, a fact of human nature tells us that there is a cost: People, almost by virtue of being human, want to experience aesthetic beauty. It is the reason we seek attractive partners, the reason we look at pictures of beautiful landscapes and the reason the medievals built beautiful churches.
Why should we deprive ourselves of such a key part of the human experience? People, companies and governments build horrible buildings everywhere, and there’s a reason people who take trips to Europe rave about the way the buildings look long after they get back. It’s time to change this pandemic of ugly architecture.
My suggestion?
Let’s start with A&M.
Kaleb Blizzard is a philosophy sophomore and opinion writer for The Battalion.
