The photo above is of the sculpture tower atop the Charles B. Wang Asian American Center being built at Stony Brook University and scheduled to open in 2002.  The largest donation in SUNY history, the Center began as a $25 million, 25,000 sq. foot facility that has grown to 100,000 sq. feet with a matching donation that even includes an endowment for maintenance.  The Center is a personal gift from Charles Wang, founder of Computer Associates (CA).

With no signs up yet to explain what the building is, however, passersby look at the tower and wonder, "What is it?"  Designed by architect Pao-Hwa Tuan, it is a modernistic sculpture of a pagoda.  Although in the West the pagoda is viewed as Eastern, in truth it is the panorama of every major city across the globe.

The pagoda began in India as the "stupa" and the oldest one dates to the 3^rd c. B.C.  The concept of the stupa traveled eastward with Buddhism and so in antiquity, it was the pagoda that united Asia architecturally.  But the pagoda concept is also the forerunner of the skyscraper and so, just as in antiquity the pagoda united Asia, in modernity the pagoda in skyscraper form architecturally unites the world.  The pagoda then is a perfect representation of what the Wang Center hopes to accomplish - a uniting of East and West. 

The pagoda has another aspect, however.  It is the epitome of what for more than two thousand years has represented the religious architectural origins of most of Asia's predominant religions.  And so from the exterior, that religious visual concept is maintained.  But the architect is a Chinese immigrant who received his architectural training in the United States and his desire is to create a blending of East and West within a uniquely modern Asian American building as well.

So as a Christian and western-trained architect, he is creating a second concept.  The design of the interior gives the expansive feeling of one's spirit being uplifted that one gets looking up in the great cathedrals of Europe.  By uniting the pagoda and cathedral concepts architecturally, P. H. Tuan is symbolically trying to show the unity of humanity under God.

The design of the pagoda sculpture is meant to be something that changes each time it is viewed.  So depending on the sky, the clouds, the position of the sun - the whole pagoda, or one vertical row at a time, can appear dark gray, light gray, blue gray, shimmery silver, blinding reflective silver like a mirror held up to the sun, white, and with the rising and setting of the sun - pink, orange, gold, purple and even mint green and metallic baby blue, as shown in the small sample below.  More photos will be available in the near future at www.sinc.sunysb.edu/clubs/educasia.

The Wang Center will contain indoor and outdoor gardens including a koi pond and scholar's garden, a three story waterfall with a heads of the zodiac fountain below, a reception area for 2000 (thus giving students whose families may be from different continents a place to wed), a state-of-the-art theatre and video teleconferencing lecture halls so that performances, talks, and conferences can be viewed worldwide, art and sculpture galleries, a cafeteria serving cuisine from all across Asia, and much, much more.

"I want this to be a place that is so exciting that everyone will want to go there," said Wang when he first proposed his building.  The Stony Brook campus eagerly awaits that day!