Today's focus: The Oral Roberts University Campus (also known as Six Flags Over Jesus)
Tulsa is a college town. However, it is also a Christian college town. This usually means that we have just as many parties, just less booze and most of them are over by about 10:30. I used to live close to the University of Tulsa, where things are a bit wilder, and several late night keggers in my neighborhood made me pine for the days I lived next to Oral Roberts University.
In the early Sixties, Oral Roberts claimed that God had come to him and told him, ""Build Me a University. Build it on My Authority, and on the Holy Spirit..." Looking at the campus' bizarre architecture, one would imagine God also told him, "Give a five year old a gold crayon and have him design it for you."
I imagine the inside of the buildings as being very functional for the purposes of a top ranked university. But the outside of the buildings? It's as if the architects went a little mad with their protractors and said, "Hey, let's use every conceivable angle except for level!"
Seriously, folks, if you stand at the right spot at sunset, the silhouette of all of the campus buildings looks like a heart monitor when the patient gets shocked with those paddles. CLEAR!
New buildings have been added over the years to accommodate the growth of the school, and the overall look of the school has been maintained throughout. They say that it's to keep the look consistent, but I suspect they're still holding out hope that someone will use the campus to remake Logan's Run, shot for shot.
The campus is also home to the Praying Hands, a legendary Tulsa landmark. There's an old joke that the hands used to be wide open until the day someone tossed up a nickel, at which point the hands closed to catch it.
It's a good school, and this was a bad "joke."
ReplyDeleteHey, I never said it was a bad school... Just really quiet with a bunch of ugly buildings.
ReplyDeleteUnless, of course you mean the crack about the praying hands, in which case I remind you that in 1987 Oral Roberts claimed that God was gonna kill him if he didn't raise $8 million.
Hey, you're doing well, this was very funny in my mind. Used to work in an ORU Building downtown (for Southwestern Bell). It had supposedly been built to count the money arriving in the mail every day. Each floor had a large room with small rooms all around the sides. The small rooms were supposed to be money-counting rooms, the large ones, envelope opening rooms. No windows anywhere . . . .
ReplyDelete