If you attend ECSU, chances are you've had at least one class in Shafer Hall, or, since it opened this semester, the new Fine Arts Building. Whether you call it the Fine Arts Building or Shafer 2000, it's pretty much the greatest place on Earth, and I'd rather lick all of its floors clean than ever set foot in Shafer ever again (R.I.P., Shafer).
Maybe I'm biased. I'm a theater major, so I spend a lot of time in the place, but as long as I'm spending thousands of dollars to learn about theater for multiple hours a day, I'd rather spend it in a well-lit, beautiful, centrally-located facility with state of the art equipment.
Why would I want to hike all the way to what is practically downtown Willimantic to spend hours in a dark, boiling-hot pile of bricks? Cavemen had better methods of controlling the temperature than they did in Shafer, which no matter the season, was BOILING hot 24/7.
You know what the new building has? A functional climate control system. And that's just the beginning.
What else does has the new building have? I'm glad you asked, because I love talking about it. I recently got a chance to peruse the guts and bones of our new work of art, and it's more beautiful than I have the words for.
Imagine a full design shop, with doors the size of elephants that open into a central chamber that leads into the black box, which also has elephantine doors, so you can just roll your set pieces around and have your show set up in five minutes.
Harry Hope Theater was nice, but do you know what it didn't have? A proscenium theater with box seats, as well as rigging up in the ceiling big enough to have stage workers walk in.
And in case you weren't satisfied with a black box and a proscenium, there's a third theater. Third! Three! And this one's acoustically designed for concerts, with walls that shift depending on what you're performing! And it's got ramps! Real, honest-to-God ramps you can walk down to your seat! I cried a little when I first saw it!
"But Sam!" you might be saying. "I'm not a theater major or a giant dweeb like you, those things don't really matter to me! I just have class there!" Well, you just walk your butt to the conveniently located building, metaphorically, and I can show you.
It's got art rooms, music rooms, practice rooms, technical rooms, classrooms, dance studios with hand rails and full-length mirrors, a staff lounge, couches, an art gallery, and more little, fake leather benches to sit on than I can count (meaning at least like, six).
But, it can't satisfy everyone. It's no Goddard Hall, with its Byzantine, washing machine-sized air conditioners. It's not Shafer, with its constant smell of onion. It has neither of those things, so it's not perfect, I'm afraid. But if you hate it because the stairs are steep and the elevator is slow, I can only say boohoo.
I guess I get why some people might like the original Shafer to Shafer 2000, in the same way that old people hated the advent of computers over analog record keeping. Why learn the new thing when you've got an old method? Why adapt?
The simple answer is because Shafer 2000 is better in virtually every manner, so if the worry is that it's a whole new layout to get used to, I will gladly get lost and live off of discarded sheet music before I go back to OG Shafer.
