Kay Spiritual Life Centre. Alias: The Cupcake.
The photo you see above is one of the many buildings that comprises American University. It is the Kay Spiritual Life Centre and is home to everything from Al Hillel (Jewish student’s association) to campus anarchists. Oddly enough the building has some of the best acoustics on campus, and so most of our school’s musical events (pathetic as our music department is) occur here.
The building has an oddly appealing architecture. The long and short of it is; it looks like a cupcake. Maybe the architect who designed it had a warped sense of humor caused by far too much acid in the 70s, or maybe he was just hungry when he designed the building. Regardless of the reasons behind the snack-cake like building, it’s an integral part of AU life and gives you something to look at when you’re sitting in the third floor of Ward, bored out of your mind, as your Western Legal Tradition teacher rambles about Hegel and Hume (no, I’m not bitter at all. Why do you ask?).
I for one am not sure who donated the money to have the Kay Spiritual Life Centre built. Obviously his name (or the name of someone he cared A LOT about) was Kay and obviously he was absurdly wealthy. But his motives for having this building installed? Who knows? I like to think, as I’m falling asleep at night (or glaring angrily at the ceiling, silently cursing my insomnia to hell) that he was a religious, right wing nut job who wanted to instill some sort of faith system into this otherwise agnostic/atheist filled campus. I smile, just a little bit, when I think of the Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu services held in Kay, right alongside the anarchists. I grin devilishly and ponder silently "he’s rolling over in his grave right now (or urn, whatever) ripping at the crepe or velvet lining of coffin."
At any rate...that was all just background information on the building. The real point of the entry takes place almost a week ago on Saturday, April 2, 2005. It was a dreadful day in D.C., absolutely pouring. Unrelatedly, it was also the day that Pope John Paul II passed on (may he find peace). As anyone who goes here knows, there’s always some sort of event occurring on campus, very few that the students actually care about, and this weekend it was some sort of music and arts festival/seminar-type-thing. As previously mentioned, because of Kay’s acoustics, a lot of the classes/events were being held there. At an unknown time, just as one of the seminar classes was ending, lightning struck the Cupcake. The flame on top of the building was struck by lighting and caught on fire. I’m beginning to think that the architect of Kay was not so much hungry when he designed it as COMING OFF OF AN ACID TRIP. Seriously. Look at the picture. No, your eyes do not deceive you. Extending out of the roof of Kay (aka the icing on the cupcake) is a GIANT METAL ROD SHAPED LIKE A FLAME. Anyone who lives anywhere on the east coast knows that while we get the occasional, summer long drought, this place is NOT THE SAHARA. We do, in fact, get thunder/lightning/electrical storms. A lot of them. I’m sorry but when you put a giant-metal-fork-like-thing on top of a building in the MIDDLE OF THE QUAD, what do you think is going to happen? Seriously. Put down the pot, acid, coke, crack or whatever your doing, get a pair of binoculars and look. Just look at that building. It’s an accident waiting to happen.
Yes people. I pay forty thousand dollars a year to go here. And guess what? I love it.
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