College of Fine Arts

The College of Fine Arts, usually CFA, is a large and impressive Beaux-Arts building on the Carnegie Mellon University campus. Its cornerstone gives the date of its construction as MCMXII, but in the absence of any actual numbers on the stone the date of CFA's construction must remain a mystery. Similarly, the large inscriptions on the west side of the building describe its five departments as Drama, Painting, Scvlptvre, Architechtvre, and Mvsic, but, as only two of those are words, what actually is studied there is somewhat indiscernible.

The abbreviation CFA is often asserted to stand for "Can't Fucking Spell", in reference to the misspellings and infelicities that litter the building's large and majestic murals, the general inability of harried and unfocused music majors to assemble the letters of the English language in their proper order, and the fact that, due to obscure long-term repercussions of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, it actually does stand for "Can't Fucking Spell".

The CFA building was recently one of the filming locations for the short film The Icon of St. Cyril, starring Elise Walton. It also is home to the Kresge Theater and its interesting, if not famous, tension grid.