21 & Over | Red Square and Suzzallo Library — A million bricks with nowhere to hide

There is a moment every campus film needs, where the characters cross open ground and the school looks like an institution rather than a set. At the University of Washington that ground is Central Plaza, which nobody calls Central Plaza. It is Red Square, an expanse of red brick laid in 1969 over the roof of an underground parking garage, and it is the widest, most exposed place on campus.

Suzzallo Library closes the eastern side, its facade all pointed arches and stone figures, built in the 1920s by a university president who wanted the library to be the soul of the school. Kane Hall squats at the west end. Between them stands Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, a rusted steel spike balanced tip to tip, which students have been photographing and complaining about for decades.

The film's characters cross this square looking like exactly what they are: three people who have made a terrible plan and are now committed to it. The square offers no cover. That is its cinematic value and also its daily reality — in January wind off Portage Bay it is the coldest hundred metres in Seattle, and everyone walks it fast, heads down.

Go inside Suzzallo's Graduate Reading Room afterwards. Sixty-five feet of vaulted ceiling, long oak tables, absolute silence. It is the exact opposite of everything the movie is about, and worth the two-minute walk from where they filmed.