To the architectural choice that students love to hate.

O! You the ramps, you the catwalks of glory, suspended by cables of fraternity; you the delicate network of human connection and movement through space and time, you the helix of obtuse angles that rises and unfurls throughout the hearth!

Your opaqueness is double-edged—when I look up, when I witness the ramps above me, I can see through your surface, and I can make out the light of day shining through your membrane, and the shadows of a pair of Doc Martens above me. And yet I cannot see exactly what is on the other side of you! Silhouettes, blurry shapes. That is all I perceive. We know that life is out there in front of us, and we can even make out a shade of what will come, but we cannot discern in sharp clarity where our lives can take us. In this, I look at you and I see life itself. You are a window and a veil, a porthole and a curtain drawn shut but hinting at the sunlight that lays on the other side of the barrier it has erected for you.

O! How you breed confusion! You upend the existing order, overturning the common institutional logic which states that the floors of a building extend all the way across it from wall to wall in a logical manner, rather than being inexplicably staggered like interlocking shelves, books piled up haphazardly on a windowsill. You engineer a liminal space—you are neither on the second floor, nor the third floor, but somewhere in between. You do not rise to become another floor until the pedestrian has reached that very floor itself, because you are nothing and you are everything in the transit of consciousness. The same, yet, again, is true for life—you do not realize you are in a new phase of your life until you stop, look around one day, and realize that everything is different, much how you do not realize you’ve already reached the fourth floor of Alfred Lerner Hall until you realize you’ve already passed the third floor and now must awkwardly turn around and stutter-step back down the ramp, until you inevitably absent-mindedly keep ambling down the petering slope in the absence of a clear distinction between floors to the oblivious mind.

For what are Time and Space but one long ramp? Just as life does not settle neatly into the lines of a calendar, there are no staircases which divide the passage of time neatly and cleanly, and nor do they do so for your ramps. You continue moving, you watch as fixtures of your life pass you by, and you rise up, up, up! In this, once again, you are like life itself.

Do not heed their grumbles, o ramps! They do not see you like I see you. They do not walk you like I walk you. They decry you, they defame you, they insult your artistic integrity, they call you an inefficient use of space for a student life center. Where they see a waste of space, I see a new space, a new dimension, one that flows and rises and falls and continues forward, ever forward, never halting to obey the harsh angles of conventional architecture. You are a constellation of arteries, the transit network for the lifeblood of the student experience. You carry us to the Commons of Ferris Booth, for joy and mirth and quesadillas and revelry! You carry us to piano lounges and black box theaters and multicultural affairs centers and advising offices. And when we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in the currents of your waters, when we have summited your highest peaks, you carry us down to the earthly pleasures that lie below, in Cafe East.

You are so beautiful, O lovely ramps! In daylight, you are cast in a warm glow, as blue as the blood in Roaree’s body; at night, you are like the night sky, illuminated against glass panes, with light scintillating through your tissue. You are robust, you are definitive. You are salvation.

A refrain: o! You the ramps. You, who are the light in my life. Keep rising forth. Take me higher.

Image via Bwog Archives