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Northwestern’s clock tower. Photo by the Genevieve Knapp / North by Northwestern. |
You creep past it at 2 a.m. on the way to Burger King during finals week. You stumble by late Friday night praying your stomach settles long enough to make it to the dorm toilet. When its face turns purple, you’re confused, and then you remember that it does that when Northwestern wins.
If you haven’t given any thought to the clock tower, you’re not alone.
“I didn’t notice it today when I walked by,” Weinberg junior Karan Kunjur said. “And, since I live on north campus, I rarely see it. I don’t have any strong feelings about the tower, and honestly, I don’t see the purpose of clock towers anymore.”
The 100-foot clock tower may not be useful. It may be too short, or too rectangular. It certainly isn’t as innovative as the library or as celebrated as the lakefill, but it holds its head high among campus architecture and may be the first part of campus that a visitor driving to Northwestern sees.
The tower’s Indiana Limestone facade and tall windows tend to raise eyebrows. Lauren Redding, a Weinburg junior studying art theory and practice, said the clock tower’s style caught her off-guard.
“The first time I saw the clock tower I was startled because it seemed to misrepresent Northwestern’s tradition as a place of academic excellence,” Redding said. “Normally when you think of an elite college, you think of colonnades and Greco-Roman-influenced architecture.”
The clock tower stands in the middle of the Rebecca Crown Center, a $3.05 million facility built to centralize NU’s administrative offices, which had been scattered across campus before 1968. In order to build the center, Evanston allowed Northwestern to cut off Orrington Avenue slightly north of Clark Street and University Place just west of Sheridan Road.
“I thought it was important to have a symbol of entry to Northwestern,” said Walter Netsch, the tower’s architect (for a longer feature on Netsch, go here).
The tower’s ties to Northwestern became a little more obvious in 1996, when the university’s seemingly unbeatable team made it to the Rose Bowl.
That’s when Kathy Johnson, an aide working in the Crown Center, had the idea to turn the tower purple. Johnson said she got the idea since the University of Texas at Austin turns their much larger tower orange. She let President Bienen know, and when facilities said it wouldn’t be too much trouble, the lights were installed within a week. The University decided to turn the clock purple every time an NU team won a major victory.
“I like that it turns purple,” Weinberg senior Kate Goodman said.“I think it’s one of the few symbols of unity at Northwestern.”
When NU wins, facilities management personnel journey to the tower and flip a switch that changes to another set of lights. The lights are covered in purple gels, the same things used to change lighting in plays. Eric Youngquist, chief electrician for facilities management, said the inside of the clock tower is a hollow shaft with a hand-over-hand wooden ladder that goes up to the clock’s machinery.
The purple lights were never part of Netsch’s original design. That’s not to say he’s thrilled with how he designed it in the first place — he would do it differently today, he said. But ask him how he would do it over again, and you’ll find out that Northwestern students aren’t the only ones ignoring the tower.
“I’m not sure how I’d do it,” Netsch said, “because I’m not thinking about it.”