East of Gambier, out on route 229, there is nothing brighter than the full moon in a clear sky. On nights like these, the road and the rolling hills beyond are bathed in milky light. A couple weeks later when the moon wanes to nothing, the entire landscape is submerged in darkness, pierced only occasionally by a twinkling of headlights.

But driving west a few miles past the lonely intersection with highway 62, something much brighter appears between the trees off in the distance. It emanates a fierce white glow, like some futuristic metropolis. If you keep driving towards that light, down 229 and right onto Duff Street, you’ll soon find yourself at the base of the largest agglomeration of glass and steel in Knox County.

For most of the Kenyon community, the KAC began life in a clear box on the second floor of Olin Library. The tiny model looked rather delicate, with a roof made from beams the size of toothpicks. 500 yards away, however, the real building began to reveal its monumental proportions. As its mammoth frame arose from the long barren construction yard, what had been merely a set of figures suddenly became a startling reality. Everybody was talking; to some, it looked like a major airport was going up. Gambier had never seen anything like it. Meanwhile, just up the hill, the Gothic Revival buildings that made Kenyon famous sat along Middle Path like deposed royalty, quaint and understated yet holding onto their dignity.

The $65 million building encompasses 263,000 square feet, with a roof covering four acres. It features a state-of-the-art media system capable of providing a broadcast-quality video feed from a swimming pool that holds nearly a million gallons of water. Yet for all its technological prowess, the building seems to lack some basic amenities. For example, there’s nowhere to lock a bike near the entrance. The idea, apparently, is to park your car as close to the front door as possible, and then hop on the treadmill.

The KAC is the latest in a series of buildings constructed on the Kenyon campus within the past few years, along with Eaton Center, Storer Hall, and the science quad. And it’s clearly not the last. A few months after the KAC’s opening ceremony, a $21 million project to renovate Pierce began. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg – the master plan developed by architect and Kenyon graduate Graham Gund calls for a major revamping of the campus landscape, replacing the Bexleys and New Apartments with new student housing in Gambier’s center, and building a new arts facility (currently estimated at $33 million) where the English cottages currently stand.

All this new construction raises several questions, the most fundamental being whether it is necessary. Kenyon now competes for the best students against a handful of other liberal arts institutions; as these other schools undertake new projects in the race to make a name for themselves, Kenyon is under a great amount of pressure to keep up. It’s not a new idea; at one point or another, colleges, corporations, and cities have all tried to define themselves with attention-grabbing architecture. But in this school’s nearly two hundred year history, countless highly successful graduates have been educated without the benefit of such exotic buildings. For them, and for much of the current generation of students, the modest houses that once belonged to professors have proved perfectly adequate as places of learning. Moreover, they are what give the place its charm.

One hopes that any new construction will acknowledge its environment, rather than try to outdo it. At the KAC’s opening ceremony last April, Kenyon’s President Nugent remarked that Gund’s designs “not only respect their surroundings, but enhance them.”  Had the KAC been constructed near Gund’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an area filled with sleek biotech complexes, this would no doubt be true. But Gambier, Ohio, is a long way from Cambridge. Perhaps surprisingly, Gund’s firm is known for its historic restoration projects. Some of his other designs, such as the (now closed) Institute of Contemporary Art, in a former firehouse in Boston, establish a balance between old and new rather eloquently. But the KAC, with its rigid geometric forms and its emphasis on “transparency” through the massive use of glass, follows in the footsteps of the International Style, the architectural paradigm that gave rise to most American city skylines. Like many skyscrapers, the KAC feels more like a monument to its architect than to the people it was designed to serve.

The KAC will establish Gund’s legacy most firmly if it proves itself to be timeless. Right across the road is the Ernst Center, which the KAC was built to replace and which will be demolished very soon. Ernst is not an old building; it was completed in 1982, and was proudly pointed out on campus tours until it shut its doors last year. It is now the most derided building on campus, a concrete eyesore that renovation could not save. Let’s hope that the KAC doesn’t wear out its welcome quite as quickly.