Harrelson Hall
Harrelson Hall is the first cylindrical classroom structure ever built on a university campus. It has a 206 foot diameter and provides an unusual focal point for the university plaza--a brick-paved courtyard reminiscent of St. Mark's Square in Venice. Halls and faculty offices are located on the rim, while lecture rooms are along the inner part of the building. The structure is honored with the name of John William Harrelson (1885-1955), the first alumnus to serve NC State as chief administrator.
Harrelson Hall has been the home of the Mathematics department since it was built in 1962. One of the features of the building is the existence of outside staircases. These cannot be seen in the photo above because they are hidden by the cylindrical shell, however the bottom of the staircase can be seen in the picture below on the left. This is similar to the outside staircases in the drawing of Leonardo Da Vinci shown the the graphic on the right below. (Note that the writing at the bottom of Da Vinci's drawing is backwards. Da Vinci annotated his notebooks in this way reportedly to keep others from stealing his ideas.)
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Harrelson Hall looks terrific from the outside, however the design of the classroom blackboards leaves a little (some would say a lot) to be desired. The space occupied by a classroom in Harrelson Hall has the shape of an element of volume in cylindrical coordinates. A horizontal cross-section has the shape of an element of area in polar coordinates as shown in the figure below. The classrooms originally had curved blackboards so that a student at point A could not see past point B on the blackboard. Eventually all the blackboards were replaced by straight blackboards.
The following is from "The Raleigh Times", January 3, 1962 (staff Photo by Allen).
Harrelson Hall, State College's unique round
classroom building opened today to its first classes. The structure, costing about $2
million, can normally accomodate 3,000 students and with complete use of all rooms, an
additional 1000 students. The largest classrooms will seat 150 students.
Dr. W. J. Harrington
(above) lectures a class in differential equations.