In chapter three of their seminal 1922 book, Civic Art, Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets described American campus Urbanism with the title “The Grouping of Buildings in America.” In telling contrast, in Chapter Two they identified most of the great classical continental precedents for campuses in “Plaza and Court Design in Europe.” It was their assertion that European Urbanism was based on an aesthetic principle of arranging public space formally and figurally. American Urbanism “differed entirely, having evolved over time...” through the informal, incremental production of individual buildings, and through them, the definition of fluid and ambiguous public space. Their observation that campus-making is a unique American cultural contribution is of profound and lasting value. This essay will probe the importance of that position to several current architectural and urbanist challenges.

What is constant in the building of the American university campus is the process of continuous physical change. American Campus Planning practice was born of a revolutionary, Jeffersonian view of humanity: a liberal education was viewed as a means for young Americans to defend their democratic freedoms over their lifetimes. In support of that goal, the campus was designed as an idealized setting: a city in the countryside or a countryside in a city. There, students were to be exposed to the civilizing powers of Architecture to impart lessons of civic duty and community service. A campus education was intended to convince students of the necessity for tradition and the possibility of cultural evolution.

The architectural principles of campus Urbanism in America are deeply embedded in the foundation of every university in the country begun before 1945. Many of these principles can be traced to the very beginnings of campus-making by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia. Others have evolved in various forms since then. Architecture and Urbanism imbued with these values express the best in the American character: valuing the familiar while exploring the new.

Despite the catastrophic disruption that the last two generations of buildings have wrought on every campus in the country, we now stand at an architectural crossroads. Clearance, sprawl, and the random juxtaposition of buildings that are the common campus pattern of today need to be replaced by an ethic of conservation and an aesthetic of judicious design. The best traditions of American campus Architecture and Urbanism must be rediscovered as a prime source for generating architectural and campus form.


1.     Interconnected, Fluid Figures of Open Space

The word “campus” came into wide use as a nineteenth-century transformation of the Italian word campo. In the first univer­sities of this country, the central group of buildings typically formed this emblematic space. The word described a shaped, public area, a piazza, which became larger and more complex, and thus the term “campus” came to represent the central place and representation of the university. Eventually, as universities became larger and more complex, the term “campus” came to represent an aggregate and interconnected set of voids, the total figure of space in between the university’s buildings. The word has now come to describe all of a university’s grounds and buildings, the total physical presence of an institution.

The incremental formation of a figure of public space is essential to the scale and character of a campus. People who live and work in academic settings depend on the definition of a network of campus places to enrich both their daily lives and their senses of identity. Since the campus is constructed sequentially through individual projects that precisely define new elements of building, open space, and landscape, the whole is affected every time the smallest physical change takes place.

A campus depends on a limited number of spatial types for its successful physical definition. Its design depends on the local climate and the particular culture of the place. These components range in size and architectural character from the small to the large, and from the simple to the complex:

• A patio is a room-sized space, no more than twenty feet on one side, and is typically an outdoor extension of a single room;
• A courtyard is a space not more than one hundred feet on one side, enclosed within a building, and intended for exclusive use by a variety of rooms;
• A quadrangle is a space not more than four hundred feet on one side, is distinct and finite, and is shared among many buildings;
• A lawn or green is a space measured at the scale of the whole campus and which defines its ritual and symbolic center;
• A field is a clearing dimensioned to accommodate athletic activities and is typically located on the edge of a campus.

2.     A Fabric of Continuous Building
    
By their location and form, buildings can define an interconnected, fluid figure of open space. They are permanent and essential physical presences. The stability of their exterior forms is a great deal more important than their floor-plans. Further, their combined form as an ensemble is more important than the particular formal qualities of any one of them in isolation.

Through their useful lives, often counted in decades, campus buildings will be used for a variety of purposes. Continuity in massing, similarity in inflection, repetition of architectural elements and materials and like­ness in construction lead to buildings fit to respond to the shifting circumstances of their use over time.

There are five types of buildings on a campus. The overall organization and image of a campus depends on the relationships between its buildings at any moment in time. Through unique design, each type generates a building of particular formal character:

• Monumental Buildings are unique in their symbolic importance. They do not represent any one academic disci­pline, and they tend to accommodate shared programs important to the entire academic community. Such buildings are prominently located. They tend to be the most physically and spatially idiosyncratic buildings on campus. Their plans and sections are complex and their elevations define them as individual objects. Their forms are emblematic of the history and the civic importance of the whole university;
• Academic Loft Buildings are the most common and versatile of all campus buildings. They are regular in plan and section, and complex in elevation, as their exterior surfaces define the scale of the campus open spaces that they front. Most teaching and research activities take place in such buildings.  They house a variety of departments representing different academic disciplines. They are adaptable over time and can be expanded with ease. They are the most ordinary building block of the campus and are found in all of its precincts;
• Laboratory Loft Buildings are a version of the academic loft, designed for unusually heavy requirements of mechanical supply and exhaust services.  They are exclusively dedicated to housing the experimental sciences. Their internal spatial arrangements are fixed. Their exterior surfaces bear the most typical campus building responsibility: through gestures of inflection with neighboring buildings, they help form the various figures of open space that define the campus;
• Residence Halls are buildings that provide facilities for student living in what amounts to campus Neighborhoods. Such buildings are organized like houses: each possesses a set of common public rooms for living, dining, reading, and recreation, surrounded by dozens of bedrooms organized in clusters around common bathrooms;
• Ancillary Buildings comprise all other buildings dedicated to the infrastructure and transportation needs of a campus. Typically, such buildings are office lots, warehouse lots, or parking structures. They are of a routine form, located and designed in a manner that befits their temporary and utilitarian character.

3.     A Cultivated Landscape

An understanding of the landscape as a language equal and parallel to the language of Architecture has been a central aspect of the American campus-making tradition. The cultivated landscape of a campus is formally connected to all open spaces, not to its adjacent buildings. Its purpose is to define distinct settings for social interaction. By its size, form color, texture, scale, and other architectural characteristics, it can strengthen the unity of the entire campus. The intimacy of patios, the engaging social character of courtyards, the formality of quads, the monumental­ity of greens, and the informality of fields are all defined through the architectural disposition of their landscape components.

The found, natural qualities of a campus should be utilized to maximize its unique character. The physiognomy of the ground, the presence of the horizon and the sky, the native vegetation, and varying qualities of light are some of the most memorable ingredients for regionally specific place-making on the American continent.

A campus is a locale of limited size, where ecological initiatives can be coupled with the aestheticization of nature. Recycling water, garbage, and sewage, using non-toxic materials and passive energy sources, conserving energy, and reusing buildings are essential strategies for guaranteeing the health of the natural environment of the campus.

Formally, the ground, walls, columns, canopies, individual rooms, and collective figures of “outdoor rooms” should be conceptualized through natural materials.


4.     A Compact Infrastructure

The American campus was developed originally as a compact, distinct academic District with a central focus, a de­fined perimeter, and a clear relationship with the town that surrounded it. As campuses grew, new projects were spaced further and further from campus centers, with separate precincts organized by location, use, and physical prominence. As cars became dominant, the scale of vehicular circulation and parking began to overwhelm the campus pedestrian. A devel­op­ment pattern that favored the design and construction of uncoordinated projects took hold. A form of campus evolved that was characterized by haphazard planning and horizontal over-extension, and which mimicked suburban sprawl.

This expansion of campuses beyond their original boundaries required more land, roads, and utility extensions. It brought universities into conflict with the Neighborhoods surrounding them. Campus walking distances increased, as students living and studying at the edges were isolated from the shared activities at the heart of the campus. The spaces between buildings were enlarged and remained uninhabited. The figural open space of campuses increasingly eroded.

Campus sprawl can only be checked through the incremental development of open space, building, and land­scape projects within pedestrian precincts. There are two means by which such places can be formed and maintained: first, by designing projects that are compact and close to existing development, avoiding excessive infrastructure extension; second, by adopting the parking-once principle. Campus users should be able to leave their cars and proceed through the activities of an entire day without needing to drive again.

A campus must remain a place where parking supports pedestrian access to precincts, not to individual buildings. These precincts then remain connected by pedestrian circulation through well-defined and beautiful realms of public space.


5.     Typological Unity & Stylistic Variety

The conceptual strategies for forming a coherent American campus rest on the recognition of the campus as a space, which is user-friendly to pedestrians. Individual projects should contribute to the creation of one of the following two kinds of campus order:

• Infill: adjusting buildings and places within existing campus precincts; or
• Extension: expanding the campus by defining both the form of new precincts and the rules for achieving precinct completion over time.

Under current architectural practice, there are several ways of generating campus form. Based on the specific parameters of their program and site, individual projects are often prescribed within a narrow stylistic range. This results in a false sense of continuity, verging on the banal. At the opposite end of the spectrum, architects are allowed to introduce projects expressed in deeply personal styles, most often of an exaggerated, monumental presence. In both cases, obsession with style—on the one hand narrowly dictating it, on the other encouraging it without limit—precludes any possibility of producing a campus as a collective form of buildings, open space, and landscape. The result is a state of visual disorder and psychic confusion.

A typological approach to campus-making represents the ultimate balance between architectural and urbanist ideals: to build a unified campus of diverse parts. Typological continuity allows projects to share the architectural elements and to function cohesively in creating a public realm. Formal compatibility then sets up a campus that remains not only visually coherent, but conceptually articulate in its development over time.

Architectural diversity is truly meaningful only when read against a backdrop of formal continuity that transcends any one individual project. Indeed, a coherent architectural context is a necessary condition for unique expression.  Therefore, a campus structure that is defined typologically supports stylistic variety.


6.     Incomplete Buildings & Complete Districts

In the era of the Master Plan, buildings became the dominant component of campus-making. Open space was devalued and landscape was most often used as an afterthought to minimize the damage so often inflicted on buildings. With buildings most often conceived as pieces of a fixed puzzle, the ultimate form of the puzzle was to be achieved by the contributions of a variety of designers. Buildings were designed in fashionable isolation; their architects covered an ever-widening aesthetic spectrum, and inflexible Master Plans failed to keep pace with campus development.

These developments in our time have been disastrous. Assemblies of isolated, formally hermetic buildings have produced blatantly incomplete campus precincts and have frayed entire campuses.

The alternative to the current state of campus dissonance is a radical reversal of architectural priorities. The fixed Master Plan should be replaced by a physical framework that differentiates between the urban form of the campus as a whole and the opportunity for incremental, circumstantial design shifts within it. Regulating plans and sections should define road, parking, utility, open space and landscape configurations as the permanent physical order of a campus. On a compulsory basis, individual projects should contribute to the design of these campus elements. By contrast, a particular building’s design should be regulated by a simple code that establishes its typological character through the essential issues of form, density and use.

The purpose of architectural design for campuses must transcend the design of individual buildings. Buildings and projects must be designed in a less self-sufficient, less resolute form. Over time, adja­cent buildings can share architectural elements through repetition, inflection, or contrast. The formal incom­plete­ness of projects can then become the source of ever more complete precincts, and harmonious, evolving, collective campus form.


7.     An Integrated Process of Development

Great projects and great campuses are contingent upon the definition of a thoroughly integrated, multi-party process of development. The academic leadership of universities should encourage the traditional notion of a campus as a teaching instrument and as an expression of the community whose purpose is aimed toward the society as a whole. It should rally academic representatives to the planning and design processes to make decisions that benefit that collective purpose, not one particular fief. It should lead to a process of realistic budgeting that leads to permanent facilities in the form of buildings intended to last fifty to seventy-five years. University academic leadership should be directly involved in the judicious choice of architects based on established competence, perhaps determined by limited competition. It should ensure that the process of Campus Planning and building is collaborative, not adversarial.

Campus Planning and campus facility construction bureaucracies need to be streamlined. They must operate under the same constraints of time and responsibility as their architects. Their mandate must be changed from a defense of the bottom line to the pursuit of designing a campus worthy of its name, with buildings that meet the test of time, both physically and culturally. Who remembers the meaningless management battles surrounding the construction of buildings even a day after their completion?

The complex subject of campus-making in America cannot be entrusted to architects alone. At the same time, architects should be offered substantial respect, support, and collaboration of the institutions they serve. Campus-making should be led by architects, and involve the active collaboration of a variety of design and engineer­ing professionals. The separation of architectural commissions into design and construction phases to be carried out by different firms constitutes an ongoing attack on architects by irreparably splitting their responsibilities. This development undermines the long-term viability of the entire architectural pro­fession. Furthermore, the division of commissions into parts such as programming and construction manage­ment, carried out by para-architects, separates the final design of buildings from decisions that can and should be crucial to their proper formation. Architecture is inherently an integrated discipline; architects need to discipline. Architects need to remain the masters of the whole process, based on a complete range of knowledge and responsibility.
 

In Pursuit of Coherence

We live in the midst of a deeply divided architectural culture. Its two poles claim opposing ideals and directions. At one pole, the proponents of a perpetual cultural revolution claim that the goal of Architecture should be the invention of ever fresh, unique, and monumental architectural form; at the other, proponents of historical continuity claim that the cultural rifts of this century can only be healed by the discovery and repetition of expressions past. In the middle, and within a very narrow band, a few architects promote the preservation of cultural traditions of the country, respect the human purposes of Architecture, and have a deep sensitivity to place and nature as the sources of our most inspired practice.

The notion of coherence is central to understanding this third way of framing Architecture and Urbanism. Awareness of history and culture leads to transformations of precedents. Order resides not only in the poetry endowed in the design of individual things, but in their connections to cultures and places, and in their ability to become points of departure for new form. Newness can be synonymous with subtlety and with cultural shifts that enrich instead of alienate.

The American campus-making tradition is an invaluable source of coherence, the source of many wondrous future projects, and a guarantee for the survival of the American university as an institution of coherence and meaning.
 
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