About Harned Hall

Our struggle to preserve Harned Hall illustrates a dilemma many universities face: how to preserve the architecture and flavor of the past while plunging headlong into the information age. Some believe that the flood of new information technologies requires buildings designed from the ground up to accommodate the many wires, workstations and projectors needed, but in our Harned renovation we have found that creative use of existing space for new technologies can sometimes more than compensate for the lack of new construction, preserving tradition in the process.

In 1986 Harned, the oldest and once most imposing building on the APSU campus, was awaiting the wrecking ball. Formerly a beautiful brick Georgian dormitory and community gathering-place with inviting lobbies and an extravagant, lofty portico, Harned had become a vacant eyesore with sagging roof, smashed windows, and a facade of rotten wood and broken brick almost beyond repair. Harned seemed an anachronism with no role to play on an increasingly electronic campus, and it was taking up valuable space. The order had gone out from university administrators: "Tear it down! Build us a lean, modern structure with few windows and lots of computers!"

This directive did not sit well with some of the older alumni and faculty who remembered Harned as the community social center and symbol of APSU, nor with a few young students who had developed an inexplicable fondness for the old derelict. So these groups together mounted an intense campaign of petitions, letters, and personal appeals--not merely to save Harned, but to make Harned once again the focal point of the campus and Clarksville, a special place that could serve the university and the community in unique ways. Our goal, in short, was to preserve the values that Harned had represented for generations of students and townspeople, and at the same time to convert Harned into a graceful electronic wonderland where students, instructors, and citizens of the area could have the advantage of the latest and best equipment for learning and teaching.

A few months later a sympathetic state legislator presented the governor with 5000 signatures asking that Harned be spared, and he agreed to do so. The state board of regents subsequently undertook the Harned renovation as a special project. The money that had been appropriated for demolition was instead used to repair the exterior, preventing further deterioration inside. Then architects, technicians, contractors, and faculty from the college of arts and sciences (which was to occupy the building) began the difficult task of determining how to interface 21st-Century technology with 19th-Century architecture in a way that would appear organic and natural.

They succeeded admirably. On June 5, 1994, Harned presented an elegantly restored Georgian face to the university. Today students once again stroll along the portico as many of their parents had done, and they cram for class under the trees on the reworked lawn. Inside, at first glance the building also looks much the same as before except for the energy-efficient light fixtures, facilities for the physically challenged--and sparkling computer labs and classrooms outfitted with the latest in information technology. The character of Harned, and the character of APSU itself, has been preserved without major compromise for students of today and tomorrow .

But under the surface, big changes have taken place. Alongside new plumbing and electrical lines, fiber-optic and Ethernet cables running DEC PathWorks link 165 office, classroom and laboratory computers. Fifty-five faculty are happily ensconced in former dorm rooms equipped with multimedia computers, unaware that their attractive bookshelves disguise the pipes of a totally new heating and cooling system. Students work in comfortable writing, foreign-language, distance-learning and desktop-publishing laboratories, unaware that the floor under them has been raised three inches to accommodate cables and that their workstations have been carefully arranged to fit pre-existing room configurations. Students in classrooms can compare Internet findings via a hidden video network linking all monitors, or watch a projected live demonstration of the new Quark Xpress beamed from a projector tucked away in an ancient ceiling, while history students can trace the Napoleonic Wars via a multimedia computer camouflaged by a conventional teacher's desk. Our distance-learning classroom with compressed-video teleconferencing is providing students access to faculty and curriculum resources at other institutions throughout the state, and around the world. A smaller, portable unit is being used for connections between businesses and Austin Peay.

The larger community has also found a new home in old Harned. Visiting alumni are delighted to find everything as they remember it (many choose to ignore the computers); townspeople come to view the traveling exhibits in the expansive lobby, which has become a major art gallery; K-12 teachers regularly come to learn the Internet from our faculty; members of Leadership Clarksville come to see models they can emulate in offices and boardrooms; high-school students preparing for college come for a preview of their future electronic world; and, soon, schools throughout the area will be equipped with facilities for communicating with our distance-learning lab.

So, Harned Hall has come roaring back to life, with the best of its old social and architectural traditions intact, blended smoothly with the best of the new world of electronics.