If you've ever lived on the residential side of this campus, you must have at one point or another asked yourself the question, "What possessed them to build the campus like this?" That's a good question, and here at GDT we aim to answer it.
I mean if you think about it the campus seems highly impractical. The power requirements of this school could easily be met if we just set up a few wind turbines along the quarter mile. Let's face it this campus is a wind tunnel. If someone had actually managed to invent a method of easily attaching a portfolio onto a specially designed skate board which would basically enable art students to wind surf across campus, they would make a fortune.
But it's not just the wind that make this campus impractical, the architecture itself is just peculiar. The architects in their infinite wisdom were conscientious about making the foundation of the library strong enough to support the weight of the building, but thy neglected to add in the collective weight of all the books that were to be contained within it. Did you know the library was sinking? And the liberal arts building is so well designed that two years ago when a big snow storm hit the area, it directed the majority of the snow to deposit itself up against the outside doors. So when the rest of the ground was covered by just a few feet of snow, all of the doors to the liberal arts building were blocked by snowdrifts that were seven feet high. As a student I don't object, but really, what were they thinking?
You've probably heard the usual answers to this question; the campus is an exact replica of a school in Arizona, it was built for riot control, or it was drafted by the man who wrote, "A Hundred and One Neat Tricks With Bricks."
So here's the answer, RIT is run by some of the sharpest, most intelligent minds in the country, and we assure you that all the confusing things you see around you really do have a deeper purpose behind them. The campus was constructed around 1968 and designed especially for riot control, but it is actually more interesting than that. It was created to easily contain and confine demonstrators to certain areas of the campus, at which point (only known through extensive testing by some of the world's most ingenious engineers) the wind would blow all the demonstrators out into the stratosphere.
It's probably not too well known that the faculty gather on campus to celebrate Independence Day with their families on these sites. It's sort of like Christmas for little kids because if they've been good that year they get to be harnessed up so they can fly like kites for the day. Most families bring a good five hundred feet of rope on which to fly their toddlers. The kids love it, it's like bungee jumping, only backwards. They spend the whole day floating in the clouds, getting tangled in each others ropes, and getting filled with lead as poachers mistakenly shoot them thinking that they were just abnormal ducks.
When it comes time to leave, the loving parents merely loosen up the tethers and let the kids land wherever the wind takes them. Then they usually travel to the Dean's Office where they have the best vantage point from which to spot their little angels' flares.
Interestingly enough, it seems that a vast majority of the children usually land in the trees next to the side of Gracies which faces the academic side. This explains the extraordinary number of shoes and other accessories that seem to conglomerate in the trees in that area. As for the little ones that don't quite make it through the ordeal, their wirelike little bodies are thrown on the grill and cooked to perfection in the great American tradition.
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