The A. Eugene Brockman Commons, constructed in 2012, consists of five buildings that wrap around a courtyard and fire pit. In these buildings are 30 townhouse-style units, which consist of two bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper floor and a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette on the bottom. Though each townhouse has a shared living room space, the busiest social space is the Commons building at the entrance to the quad, where students can do laundry, use the stove, or study on one of many couches. Hastings + Chivetta Architects, who designed the space, describe the Commons and its colonnaded porch as the “centrepiece” of the new construction.
During GSP, Brockman Commons transforms into an office space/living quarters combo. If students are looking for packages dropped off from home, or to complete office hours assigned for tardiness to class, they head to the Commons building. If they are looking for Bryan or Jenny or Joey, they go to Brockman #30 (affectionately known to those who were Centre students as “30 Brock”) across the sidewalk. Their beloved teachers, the members of our faculty, live in the other units around the courtyard, each in a townhouse of their own.
It's hard for me, as a Centre alum, to reckon the two Brockmans in my mind. As a student, I knew this space best as my dorm. I lived with four of my closest friends in 30 Brock as a senior—indeed, the bedroom behind Bryan’s desk was once mine. I spent hours sitting at the kitchen counter applying for grad school and writing papers for the Shakespeare class I was no longer able to put off for another semester. I played hundreds of rounds of Dutch Blitz and Pandemic at the coffee table. I hung stockings at Christmas on the walls. I wrote bad magnetic poetry on the refrigerator. I stood at the bottom of those stairs and yelled to wake up my roommates for early-morning classes and convos and rehearsals. I cried on the floor of that living room the night before graduation. But it no longer exists that way in my mind. Now, when I picture Brockman, I think of GSP.
Brockman is the beating heart of our community during the seven weeks it belongs to us every summer. It’s where our office staff diligently chips away at the menial tasks of running an educational program, making copies and planning field trips and taking phone calls from worried parents. It’s where you can see Bryan’s collection of community photos from every summer he’s been with GSP, with so many to count, they no longer fit on the same wall. It’s where you can often find Margot and Eloise playing on their splash pad in the courtyard. It’s where the faculty gather after a long day of class on the patio, sitting in their camping chairs around a folding table.
At this table, I’ve laughed until I cried as Bryan tells a hundred different hilarious stories from his twenty-plus-year history with GSP. I’ve learned more about international politics and Star Wars than I ever thought I’d care to know. I’ve learned to trust my instincts as an educator, to use Legos to teach an important lesson about clear communication, to hammer out new plans for the next day on the fly when a class discussion took an unexpected but interesting turn. Most importantly, I’ve made lifelong friends who I can write songs about decades-old inside jokes with and who I can turn to for commiseration after a long day in the classroom. I did not learn how to become a better teacher in the pedagogy classes I took in my doctoral program. I am the teacher I am today because of the conversations that I’ve been part of on the Brockman Commons patio over the past six summers.
Beginning Monday, Brockman will start its transformation back into its former self, into the dorm version of it I once knew. Centre’s senior class will move in, will command strip a thousand pieces of art to the walls, will lay on these floors and mourn the loss of a place that feels like home just as I once did. These walls will know the chaos of college life, of a frenetic and frenzied pace of life. But come next June, Brockman’s heartbeat will begin to slow as the office staff unloads boxes and sets up mailboxes, and as the faculty set out their chairs on the patio. It will become a place of purpose, of connection, of community, of sustenance for a program that, if we’re lucky, will outlive us all.
I give the Brockman Commons five stars.