Alright - I'm a Grad Student, working in Hammond Building. I want to respond to this a bit.

First off - I'm not going to argue that, in terms of raw curb appeal, Hammond Building isn't exactly the crown jewel of Engineering buildings. Certainly the total lack of front doors should have raised some eyebrows, but it's a little late now. I stop short of calling it "horrible" though. Reber and Sackett aren't bad - they're like any other average academic building in my eyes. Same with the EE buildings. Of course, if you want to look at the business school or IST, Engineering is going to come up short. Sadly, this was also the case at my undergrad institution as well.

However - Don't let the ugly buildings fool you. PSU Engineering has some pretty cool stuff going on. The College operates its own supercomputing clusters (Which I use extensively, and it makes me far more effective than if I was using the University clusters). There's an anechoic icing chamber, one of the best wind tunnels in the nation (world?), 2 major water tunnels, a supersonic wind tunnel, many labs doing a range of research, the Applied Research Laboratory, VLRCOE, and that's just the stuff I've learned about in the year I've been here.

Point being - yeah, the buildings aren't as pretty, but we get things done. Don't let the outer appearance fool you. I don't think you'd meet a single person who works in Hammond that wouldn't welcome a nice brick and ivy building with natural lighting - but short of that, we've got a pretty nice set up. The building was designed by the University - the tech inside of it was put there by the college. So, for our part, I think we're doing alright.