Recently I had a chance to visit Hoover Tower at Stanford University, which I hadn’t been to the top of since I was a kid. From the top of the tower you can see not only the campus below but as the as far as the bay if you squint a little.
The tower’s design is an odd contrast between the styles of Art Deco, which is typically associated with the social realism, vs. the rather stark minimalism present with Hoover Tower. Compared to Coit Tower — which was built around the same time — the lack of colorful murals in the lobby is almost surprising.
Almost. The building’s austere aesthetic matches the history and politics of Herbert Hoover, the conservative US president who only served a single term while the economy crashed and burned around him. This sequence of events ushered in FDR, a pro-labor president and author of the New Deal.
The situation was so bad that makeshift homeless villages came to be known as “Hoovervilles.” Which, come to think of it, is probably why the former president wanted to build something else named after him.
The Hoover Tower was built as a library (which it still houses) and as the visual centerpiece of the Hoover Institution, an oddly out of place conservative think tank
For some fun trivia about the tower check out this article in Stanford Magazine.
