Campuses in Place [Theme Article]

Campuses in Place Frances Halsband Websites, View Books, and finally, campus visits. Lost downtown. No place to park. “Mom, Dad, this is The Place. This is where I want to be.” The best university campuses are places that have been carefully designed over decades, even centuries. They are places that speak to us of continuing care, thoughtful deci- sion-making, reverence for tradition and ritual, and a har- mony of nature, landscape, and architectural design. They are places that invite us to participate in the thoughtful creation of our communal environment. They are famil- iar, inviting, alluring, mysterious. Richard Brodhead has defined the university as home: “a defensive structure,” and a “world of belongingness thrown up against a larger world of exposure and strangeness” — but also, essentially and fundamentally, a “terra incognita,” a place of “disorienta- tion, defamiliarization.” 1 Walking through the gates, we walk into the world of our future. These qualities raise important questions for designers of new campus buildings and open spaces. Many American university campuses began on open land outside developed areas, but our cities have now grown to envelop them, complicating the distinction between “town” and “gown.” Today, many American universities are called upon to be simultaneously inward-focused learning communities and outward-oriented providers of service and amenity. Embedded in urban settings, their greens may be, in some sense, public parks; their libraries, theaters and athletic facilities invite outsiders; and students and nonstudents mingle in adjacent residential neighborhoods and com- mercial streets — spaces whose rhythms are defined by the campus calendar, but which are fully open to the outside world. Many of the most difficult issues faced by universities are apparent at their perceived edges. It is here that the characteristic tension between the university’s desire to be both included and separated from the larger polis becomes most apparent. On campus, pressure to increase the den- sity and scale of buildings often threatens the very quali- ties of space and social interaction which make campuses memorable. But when universities try to push outward, surrounding neighborhoods are likely to push back — and often with good reason, since these neighborhoods them- selves have evolved into historic districts, with their own memorable and distinctive qualities of space and architec- ture. As a result, campus edges are frequently flashpoints of bitter controversy. Faced with such strong opposition to external growth, university planners have recently begun to look for new ways to coexist. One consequence is that the original design paradigm of academic life around a campus green, so carefully considered and nurtured through the last century, is everywhere giving way to new informal places which hide their academic roots. Starbucks is now at the center — and at the edge. Off-campus housing is the new solution to on-campus life. Remotely located biotechnol- ogy laboratories are the new norm. Are these new university spaces “campuses”? Or are they something else entirely? Have we lost the clarity of the original idea of “collegial” life to a blurring of domains; or are dynamic new typologies of mixed-use places for research and learning emerging? Will the next genera- tion of children get out of the car in the middle of this new melange of university and city and announce “Mom, Dad, this is The Place. This is where I want to be!” An American Ideal In the United States, the early twentieth century was a period of intense focus on campus design. The Olmsted Brothers, Warren Powers Laird, Paul Cret, Ralph Adams Cram, Frank Day, Charles Klauder, and others provided campus plans for numerous universities. These places continue to serve as cultural paradigms. Early Olmsted plans showed individual buildings gathered around green lawns with curving boundaries and paths. Typical were the oval lawns of Smith College, shaded with (now) enormous trees, ringed with energetically Victorian buildings, and affording tantalizing glimpses of Paradise Pond. Later designs by Laird, Cret and Klauder kept the sanctity of campus greens, but interpreted them as formal rectangles, bounded by connected ranges of buildings, “where one building serve[d] to enhance, because of proximity, the value of another.” 2 The shape and style of these places was not merely sce- nographic. Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910, envisioned a collegiate system of educating the whole man, in and out of the classroom. To him, the college experience required “a certain seclusion of mind preceding the struggle of life, a certain period of with- drawal and abstraction.” He described Princeton as “this little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own.” 3 Wilson himself sketched a physical reconstruction of the Princeton campus which joined the buildings into quadrangles, or separate colleges, such as he had seen at Oxford and Cambridge. Wilson’s Quad Plan was realized in Klauder’s romantic design for dormitories that recalled Halsband / Campuses in Place