I’m writing this from the second floor of Meyer Library at Stanford – I have some meetings today on campus. It’s nice to be here, and I find myself being much happier and productive working in a library. I think I’ve been trying to spend too much time working from home. I should set some kind of rule that I don’t turn on the computer until I leave the house.
Meyer is a monolithic cube that’s at the center of everything, composed of stacked computer labs and libraries. It looks like it was deposited on campus by the Borg. The bottom floor stays open 24 hours, and I used to operate exclusively out of there. You’d see people biking by through the enormous glass walls – people would walk through on their way to class – you could write your paper all night and get coffee in the morning at MoonBeans, or go outside and sit by the fountain in moments of confusion.
It was my social and academic hub, my office, my command center. It was my locker, my studio, my dorm room. I slept there at least ten nights out of every year. I had trouble connecting to a lot of the (see above, monolithic) physical environment at Stanford, but Meyer saved me. I wrote poems on the second floor and papers on the first. In fact, I wrote the entire adaptation of FAUST (in longhand, for some reason) on the first floor overnight in freshman year. Also spent a large amount of time in the video labs upstairs when I worked with the Film Society. I had my first (and only) Stanford bike stolen from outside Meyer, too.
I did finish my thesis upstairs at Tressider, however. I don’t remember why. I think it was probably the proximity of the parking lot. Ah, and the printers.
Apparently Meyer is slated for demolition in 5 years. I do hope they’ll replace it with some other equivalent 24-hour cluster right next to the coffee shop. This building got me through school.
Stanford felt, at first, like such an isolating campus, from the vast distance between everything, to the way the place was obviously laid out for golf-carts and cars, to the way people would whiz by on their bikes, preventing you from having conversations on the way to class or meeting strangers. When I lost my bike, and sort of found Meyer at the same time, I began to understand I was only going to appreciate the campus on foot. Meyer was at the center. You could sit there, or around there, and meet and see people in a natural way. It felt the way that I had always hoped that going to college would. It felt connected.
And I started meeting a Stanford subculture of people who had also rejected the Bike – and taking poetry classes – and hanging out at EBF. I don’t know if I would have made any of these transitions if not for this building, and the architecture which gave me a sense of place and community. When I was lost, I could go here, and pretend that I knew what I was doing.
I feel about Meyer the way I feel when I walk into a theater. It’s nothing but a box on the outside, but on the inside there are high ceilings, full of light, and people creating interesting work. It feels wholeheartedly devoted to academia and the intellectual life in a way not many environments on campus do. I never used the Silent Study much, but I appreciated that it was in the building.
RIP, Meyer. We hardly…well, actually, we knew you quite well.
I suppose if it’s going to be torn down, it would be a good time to start asking people if we can do a site-specific play here before it is.
Dara Weinberg 