As the recently-announced ResX task force’s plans for campus development continue to make waves, one sub-provision in the hundred-plus-page report has gone largely unremarked upon: the University’s plans to build an enormous, purposeless metal structure directly outside your dorm room window.
“The space right outside your window, separated from your bed by only a few feet of air and a thin plywood wall, is the ideal site for us to construct what will surely be a fantastic addition to our campus ecosystem,” noted Vice Provost for Student Affairs Susie Brubaker-Cole. “This massive, clanging megastructure might not have any specific ‘reason to exist,’ but the commotion caused by its construction plays a key role in our vision for a better Stanford.”
Blueprints released by the ResX team confirm that the structure — a shapeless mass of jagged scrap metal and protruding rebar simply labeled “Fig. 1: Behemoth” — will serve neither a functional nor aesthetic purpose. Neither does it have an estimated completion date, as administration reportedly plan to have the structure demolished and restarted any time it begins to resemble anything that could plausible be construed as appealing to any possible version of a finished product.
“We’ve even gotten approval from the Santa Clara County zoning office to move the structure around to whatever dorm you draw into, over and over again, until you graduate,” a grinning Brubaker-Cole promised. “Wherever you are on campus, our construction team will be there too, banging away with jackhammers and comically-oversized mallets at all hours—but particular between midnight and six in the morning, sometimes during naptimes and especially on holidays, weekends, and finals week—without any particular goal in mind.”
At press time, ResX had confirmed that they were in the midst of inquiries on the legal hurdles and federal approval (or, when relevant, the approval of the UN’s Human Rights Committee) necessary to have the useless metal structure continue to undergo construction directly outside of the window of any room you sleep in for the rest of your life, only reaching its conclusion atop the grave of your recently-buried corpse.
“This is just what your life is now,” Brubaker-Cole concluded.
