This is the inside body of a grand piano in the basement of the music building. This particular room is B9 along the hallway behind the lounge. The music building, from the steps of Wilson Hall, is the last building on the right down at the end of the quad. This piano and this room are used for the betterment of the performance of piano students. There are special locks on the doors of the rooms with grand pianos for which only piano majors have keys to ensure only they are given privilege of using them.
The Music Building was built in 1989 to house classrooms, listening labs, offices, and practice rooms, so the space is being used precisely for it’s original intention. The only problem with some of the practice rooms is that they’re not nearly as spacious as they need to be, but they certainly get the job done.
Honestly, these rooms are painted a bleak white and have nothing more in them than a piano and a small shelf on the wall. They may do well to start using energy efficient lights, but other than that, not much can be done to make the rooms more “sustainable.”
I’m willing to wager that about 80% of my time during the week is spent in the music building. It’s where most of my friends are located throughout the day; and it’s where my major programs are located. I take almost double the amount of classes of the average student on top of the fact that I practice about 3 hours a day (sometimes more) so when I leave my room in the morning, I can expect to be gone for 12-14 hours. Over the next four years, I’ll probably spend more time in the music building than in my dorm or apartment, so it would only stand to reason that the music building and the piano practice rooms would be one of the most familiar things to me throughout all of JMU.
I think, for the most part, at least around the quad, the architecture is still pretty parallel. The new performing arts center across South Main Street is a $90 million project, and yet it still upholds the “bluestone” look of every other building on the quad. There are newer looks across campus as buildings increase distance from the quad, like Festival or the Skyline dorms, and the ISAT building has a look almost of Superiority simply because it’s so big.
From what I see, there are three major architectural designs on campus: there is the quad with the class, bluestone look; there are the simple brick buildings like in the Village or Warren Hall; and there are the newer building on East Campus which are actually all very similar in style and structure. I love the look of the quad, but I feel like having two or three big sections on the campus with different designs as opposed to EVERY building being the same gives the illusion that there are different sections among students socially, like states in a country.
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