Hughes-Trigg Student Center Facade

Many mathematical concepts are important in architecture, and a particularly important one is symmetry. Rarely will you see a building so carefully displaying mirror symmetry as the lovely, neo-Classical Hughes-Trigg Student Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University. If you imagine a vertical line running from the highest point of the building straight down through the center line of the doors and the center of the steps, you will see that virtually every element of the building on the left of that imaginary line is replicated identically, except flipped as if in a mirror, to the right of that vertical line. That replication goes for columns, windows, doors, railings, moldings, drainpipes, and more. It even goes so far as to dictate the placement of lightning rods, and to cause the leftmost and rightmost doors into the building to be hinged in opposite directions.

Can you find any violations of this near-perfect, rigid symmetry? I was only able to find two. The first is the inscription above the columns; that asymmetry is unavoidable, as English text, like most languages, has an inherent directionality or asymmetry, in the case of English reading left-to-right. And the other exception, as you’ll see below, is an allowance for SMU pride.In this detail, you can see that the revered SMU stallion logo maintains its universal run to the right on both sides of the main entrance doorway, instead of being reversed on the right-hand side to maintain the mirror symmetry. Overall, the Hughes-Trigg facade is an interesting study in the power of symmetry to shape the impression created by an image, and power of breaking that symmetry to emphasize a detail like the stallion.