CAMPUS PLANNING

As the traditional college evolved into the modern university at the dawn of the 20th
century, campus planning reached a new complexity. For more than 200 years, college
campuses reflected the colonial models of Harvard College (1636), the College of
William and Mary (1693), and Yale College (1717), the latter of which began as a few
buildings with grass lawns. The evolution from simplicity to complexity saw varied
interpretations of Gothic, medieval, and Georgian institutional architecture as the
symbolism of higher learning grew more grandiose, corresponding with the growth and
purpose of education in the nation.
A new awareness of the importance of scientific scholarship and rationalism changed
the function and scope of education. Disregarding tradition, colleges became more
specialized, emulating English and German models of the university that combined
colleges. Johns Hopkins University (1867), for example, located its first campus in plain
buildings on Baltimore’s city streets, distinguishing itself from its predecessors by
purposely ignoring the familiar picturesque settings that had guarded college learning.
Like the political laboratories of German education, the university expressed a new
scholarly purpose, one that was utilitarian and serious.
As complex universities replaced traditional colleges, they grew larger, replacing the
memory of the village with the image of the city. Not incidentally, a new type of campus
planning emerged that took its fundamental reference from urbanism. By 1900, campus
planning fell under the thrall of the Beaux-Arts, which also had a great influence on
urban planning as a result of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.
With its ordered City Beautiful buildings and boulevards, the exposition emphasized
stately systems of organization that implied not only virtue but order, characteristics
eminently suited to the image of the university.
Educational institutions, faced with the need to integrate an increasingly complex
array of facilities within a unified design, were easily drawn to the principles of the City
Beautiful and its Beaux-Arts high-mindedness. After 1900, numerous articles appeared
bemoaning the “un-unified character” of the campus. The main task facing the campus
planner, noted A.A.D.F.Hamlin, the educator and architect, was to create a “unity of
effect.” Critical to this endeavor was the idea of the master plan. Campuses, like cities,
took up the idea of planning in a swell of Progressive Era enthusiasm.
The influence of the Columbian Exposition was immediately evident in Henry Ives
Cobb’s 1893 plan for the University of Chicago. Stylistically linked to English Collegiate
Gothic models, Cobb’s plan lacked much of the elaborate Beaux-Arts detail evident in
Charles McKim’s 1894 (revised) plan for Columbia University, which was the first
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campus plan to really show the practicality of Beaux-Arts symmetry to meet the needs of
the new multi-structure university. The designation “university” was part of the new plan,
changed from Columbia College when Columbia moved from its small midtown location
to its new site on upper Broadway, the former site of the Bloomingdale Asylum. McKim,
who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and had designed a building for the Chicago
exposition, produced a plan for Columbia that was eminently urban—absent dormitories,
with buildings that abutted the street and an entrance on Broadway—while expressing an
extremely formal presence that included a domed colonnaded main building
hierarchically raised above the symmetrical campus. The Broadway entrance evoked a
stately formalism, in tune with its Beaux-Arts influence, leading to a campus quadrangle,
McKim’s version of the Beaux-Arts cour de honneur (main courtyard).
Beaux-Arts campus planning soon became the rage. McKim, with his partners Mead
and White, were hired to develop a new campus plan at Thomas Jefferson’s University of
Virginia, whereas Parker, Thomas and Rice designed a new Beaux-Arts campus for Johns
Hopkins in 1904. Cass Gilbert produced an elaborate Beaux-Arts plan for the University
of Minnesota in 1908. Olmsted’s parklike plan for the University of California at
Berkeley campus was put on the shelf, and a competition was held that awarded the
commission for a new campus to a Frenchman, Emiule Bénard (almost all the entrants
were Beaux-Arts trained), who created a grand and ornate campus plan. However, when
Bénard, in a pique, refused to move to California to supervise its realization, John Galen
Howard (who placed fourth in the competition) replaced him, substantially modifying
Bénard’s plan, softening it, and integrating other elements from the traditional American
campus planning.
Beaux-Arts architecture fulfilled another need for the new university: it expressed a
grand monumentality of permanence and importance that appealed to a new wealthy class
of philanthropic benefactors who emerged in the early 20th century. Cloaking themselves
in art and culture, these philanthropists set their sights on creating personal memorials.
The philanthropic benefactor desired a worthy monument. With large sums of money
being contributed to educational institutions, it became necessary to provide tangible
evidence of the gifts beyond the expansion of research programs and academic pursuits.
Gone was the notion of utilitarian educational structure, as evidenced in the new Parker,
Thomas and Rice Beaux-Arts campus for Johns Hopkins in 1904. The campus of
architectural grandeur had arrived.
John D.Rockefeller’s endowment to the University of Chicago was bestowed without
direct involvement in campus planning. However, Leland Stanford had no such hesitancy
when he endowed Stanford University at the end of the 19th century, transforming
Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for informal structures set carefully in the coastal foothills
behind Palo Alto into a formal arrangement of buildings around a fully enclosed
quadrangle. Anticipating Beaux-Arts formalism, the university was built on a flat site laid
out with a formal axis. Stanford’s ordered monumentality made a good fit with his desire
for a proper personal monument. At the same time, it suited the emerging needs of the
new expanding university.
So influential was the Beaux-Arts campus that it essentially defined campus planning
in the first half of the 20th century. Even campuses that were developed in the 18th or
19th century rushed to modify their campus plans in the Beaux-Arts fashion in the early
1900s. The modifications to Olmsted’s plans at the University of California at Berkeley
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and Stanford were emblematic of the changing tide. As Olmsted’s firm was taken over by
his two sons, it could not ignore the trend, and so it specialized in campus planning in the
Beaux-Arts style, developing a plan for Harvard that emphasized strict symmetry and
axiality.
Princeton University sometimes seemed to be at the whim of these changes, going
from a symmetrical campus in the early 19th century to a more informal campus plan at
the end of the century to a revised plan at the beginning of the 20th century by Ralph
Adams Cram that emphasized a new axial order, even though Cram’s plans,. Gothic in
style, also included many smaller spaces that ignored Beaux-Arts conventions. At the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, the École-trained Paul Philippe Cret transformed the
existing campus in 1908 with a new central axis, cross axes, and domed buildings laid out
in a Beaux-Arts pattern. In 1910, Cass Gilbert redesigned the University of Texas at
Austin with a new integrated pattern of formal quadrangles and a centralized tower
monument.
With the expansion of higher education in the 20th century and the increasing
presence of the large university, another trend developed that sought to reestablish the
intimacy of the college campus. Although running not quite counter to Beaux-Arts
principles, often embodying many of its formal characteristics, it nonetheless sought to
bring about a more collegiate presence by looking back to the form of the English
medieval college.
The principal physical expression of this nostalgia was the enclosed quadrangle, which
evoked a kind of cloistered and secluded education that most 20th-century campus
planning had moved beyond. If its principal metaphor was the monastery, it was
nonetheless a very collegial monastery where intellectual life was hoped to thrive within
a closed setting of fellowship.
The most popular advocate of this collegiate traditionalism was Cram, a political
conservative who was opposed to the “Germanic secularism” of contemporary campus
planning and sought to rectify it with romantic evocations of medieval architecture that
relied on Gothic structures and closed quadrangles. Cram’s Gothic campuses sprang up at
West Point, Sweet Briar College, and Richmond College in Virginia as well as at
Princeton.
As neo-Gothic enthusiasm spread, often in the form of a compromise between
medievalism and classicism, new proponents took up the style. Around 1914, Charles
Zeller Klauder designed Cram-influenced structures at Wellesley, Cornell, and Princeton.
In 1925, he developed a campus plan for Concordia Seminary in St. Louis that relied on
Cram’s formula of a cathedral tower and monastic buildings set around quadrangles. In
Pittsburgh, Klauder was responsible for the towering 42-story Gothic Cathedral of
Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, which dramatically expressed the underlying
religious preoccupation of the neo-Gothicists. Built in 1926, the building seemed almost a
moral corrective to the symbolic significance of the skyscraper. The university, Klauder
seemed to be saying with his heaven-reaching edifice, relied on God, not Mammon.
Prior to World War II, campus planning stodgily resisted inroads by modern
architecture. Although a few anomalies to the traditional campus were to be found, for
the most part higher education regarded modern architecture with a frozen look of
displeasure. By the 1940s, International Style structures began to reface American cities
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but exerted little influence on college campuses. Mies van der Rohe’s 1938 plan for the
Illinois Institute of Technology was a noted exception.
Also in 1938, Frank Lloyd Wright tried his hand at campus planning at Florida
Southern College. The result was a geometrically fascinating arrangement of irregularly
shaped buildings. However, like Wright’s highly schematic urban plan, Broadacre City, it
remained mostly a curiosity. Other notable experiments of the prewar era were Paul
Rudolph’s master plan for the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Walter Gropius and
Marcel Breuer’s plan for Black Mountain College. In New York City, Hunter College
came forth with a brazen new International Style structure in 1942 but had few followers,
even though the trend seemed serious in architectural magazines that debated the wisdom
of “going modern” on the campus.
After World War II, society was recast socially, economically, and demographically.
Huge increases in college enrollments forced the need for new campus planning. At the
same time, however, college designers began to abandon the idea of the master plan in
favor of growth contingencies that emphasized flexibility and adaptability.
The result was an abandonment of the fully integrated campus, as new, large
unconventional structures began to be built to meet enrollment increases and fill in spaces
on traditional campuses. Freed from the restraints of compatibility, university
administrators concentrated on building programs that featured large, often out-of-scale
improvements to dormitories, student unions, and laboratories.
An early example of the new attitude toward campus planning was Alvar Aalto’s
sprawling modern dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949,
followed four years later by Eero Saarinen’s three-pointed auditorium. At Yale
University, a hodgepodge of new structures took defiant residence on the campus,
including Louis Kahn’s Art Gallery, Gordon Bunshaft’s Rare Book Library, Paul
Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building, and Philip Johnson’s Science Center. When
campus additions were conceived of as a group, as they were at the Harvard Graduate
Center in 1949, they were often sited irregularly in unpredictable arrangements that
defied the traditional norm of the college quadrangle.
The new campus planning was an aggressive repudiation of Beaux-Arts planning, with
each new building conceived of as an individual unit, as dramatic and unpredictable as
the times. When campus planners reached into the past, it was often no further than Paris
in 1932, where Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret established a vocabulary of forms at
the Swiss Student Hostel that relied on masonry framing, minimal detailing, and the
calibrated curtain wall.
When considerations were given to planning an entire campus, the presiding rationale
was often based on organizing by function and accessibility. The new plan for the
University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in 1965, for example, focused on developing
specialized areas, instead of having separate buildings for each department, with
circulation being the foremost priority.
The social upheavals of the 1960s challenged the traditions of formal education and
brought about significant changes to education if not always campus planning. The
University of California at Santa Cruz took a large step away from the traditional college
campus with its 1963 master plan by John Carl Warnecke and Associates, which totally
dispensed with the idea of formal symmetry and took the site’s natural topography in the
California coastal foothills as a basis for locating the campus’ “cluster colleges.”
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The most innovative of the clusters was Moore and Turnbull’s Kresge College,
University of California, Santa Cruz, created like a rural compact village in sight of the
ocean. At the same time the plan reached into the future, it evoked campus planning
ideals from the past. Intact was the romantic notion of education isolated in nature.
Recalling Jefferson’s ideal of dialogue and proximity between students and faculty at the
University of Virginia, the plan encouraged faculty to live on the campus in informal
settings near where they teach. It also recalled Olmsted’s original plan for the Berkeley
campus by minimizing the proportion of land to buildings and keeping them informal—a
university regulation prohibits any building taller than two-thirds the height of the coastal
redwood trees that populate the area.
Another radical departure in campus planning came about after William Pereira’s
1960 plan for the University of California at Irvine, planned around a series of concentric
rings. Although Pereira’s plan appeared to lack any overall design concept, it became a
proving ground for the postmodern campus, especially after 1985, when Frank Gehry’s
three-pavilion structure for classrooms, engineering laboratories, and administrative
facilities provided a new shock to the system for campus planning.
Along with structures by Robert Venturi, Eric Moss, and Charles Moore, Gehry’s
colorful collage of ramps, stairways, porches, and canopies created a furor at the time; it
also might have served as an annunciation in campus planning, sweeping in an even freer,
more unpredictable collection of ideas of what the campus should be.