You work in it, you eat in it, and chances are, you live in it. Like it or not, you've had some experience with the wild, wacky world of Brandeis architecture. Pondered by scholars for years, everything about it seems to defy explanation, from Usen Castle, festooned with towers and fire escapes, to Spingold, which the recruitment brochures are duty-bound to describe as being "shaped like a top hat," all the way to the elongated shape of the campus itself, which seems to have been designed for maximum student exhaustion. So really, what were the architects thinking?As it turns out, the answer is interesting enough to warrant an entire exhibit on the subject. "Building Brandeis: Style and Function of a University," is on display this fall in the Robert D. Farber University Archives of the Goldfarb Library.

Through a collection of building plans, letters, pictures and texts, "Building Brandeis" sheds some light on a most peculiar process.

What started out as Middlesex University, with its farmlands, rustic buildings and yes, its Castle (commissioned by founder John Hall Smith to add prestige to a university that was constantly blasted by the American Medical Association), eventually transformed into the modernist, disjointed campus we know today. "Building Brandeis" chronicles this evolution, and it clarifies quite a bit.

That long walk from one side of the campus to the other makes a lot more sense once you realize that the design was intended to improve automotive access. Meanwhile, some may find it heartening to learn that the original designs of Ridgewood and Massell were created by the renowned Eero Saarinen (who was responsible for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis), and that the overwhelming red brick/fieldstone/glass theme was the bright idea of Max Abramovitz (architect of Avery Fisher Hall in New York's Lincoln Center), who felt it would complement the New England landscape. For fun, you can just check out the original design of Spingold, which resembled a Disneyland spacecraft circa 1963.

Incomplete in many areas-for example, there's absolutely no rationale provided for the Shapiro Campus Center's horrible shade of green-but still worth a look for the curious, "Building Brandeis" satisfactorily explains the architectural enigmas of our university.