157 Old-school

When I was in a primary school I spent 3 years in a old wooden schoolhouse which was perhaps one of the oldest building in the city. It was grand and beautiful with green courtyard and wisteria trellis where bumblebees scared us. The most unforgettable was the marvelously structured wood beam of the gymnasium. Before the school was rebuild to a new house, and it was just a few months before my graduation I had secretly scraped a bit of wood chip from the beam in memory of old house. 

Years later the high school I went was also a big old schoolhouse with more than a thousand students and about fifty teachers and staffs walking around. At that time I was absorbed in painting, and art room was my main hangout after class. It was located in a wing separated from classrooms and had a high ceiling, lots of plaster busts like Venus of Milos, Michelangelo's David, skulls of buffalo, and was filled with strong smell of oil paint. Again, the old building was reconstructed just before my graduation. The new one is designed to be bright and modern, too much modern, with a strange-shaped canopied entrance like a space station.

At university I was again studying in very much old buildings. The college was  a mixture of genuine classical architectures and just old worn-out builldings except for some science and high-tech laboratories. I enjoyed both of them, especially when exploring these old&new buildings in search for architectural  surprises (which was surprising only to a young, innnocent and ignorant sophomore.) Part of the old buildings were totally renewed after my graduation, but the ancient clock tower is still left.

I remember how I was fascinated at first sight by the decent stoic glass & concrete cubes in a futuristic campus when I was sudying at another university before. While I am a follower of modernism design, the school building is the only category that I accept the charm of old style.