We face a similar moment of technological influence now. Six years ago, William Mitchell mused, "If a latter-day Jefferson were to lay out an ideal educational community for the third millennium, she might site it in cyberspace." Yet the computer has actually led to few physical changes to the campus. It certainly has not superceded it: Outside of vocational education, distance learning's prospects are dubious.
The campus underwent disorienting changes for love of new technology in the '50s and '60s, and no one much liked it. In the business world, corporate campuses are still designed to last only 20 years or so, but universities are staking out a new future by looking to the durable, flexible architecture of the past.
Computers present campus design a very real challenge, though not the obvious one. Campus designer Adam Gross says he has "yet to find a university that tells us, 'Our academic mission is so driven by technology that that should be the organizing principle of our grounds.'" On the 21st-century campus, students no longer need to go to specific places - the library, the lab, the professor's office - to do work. All they need is a laptop and a network connection. But the newfangled student-as-mobile-learning-unit (the wandering nerd) risks becoming the student-as-atomized-loner (the shut-in nerd). A recent Michigan State University study found that at any given time more than half of its freshmen are online. "Kids now stay in their rooms, glued to their computer, doing whatever they do," Gross observes. "So schools feel the need to develop better communal spaces, to get students out and doing the things people did five years ago."
In the past, educational space has been modeled on the agora, the monastery and the factory. Today the model is the cafe. "You might be sitting around doing your work as a small seminar in the student center or the library," says Scott Brown, "and having coffee at the same time. The cybercafe is now very important."
Informality and instant communication lead to cross-disciplinary interaction, and here, too, the cafe model works. "When we design labs," Scott Brown says, "we think of the circulation cores - where the elevators and the stairs meet the corridors on the lab floors - and we put coffee lounges there. We put in armchairs and blackboards and chalk, so people do more than sit around with their laptops. And then we ask, 'Will the Nobel Prize be won at the lab bench or in the coffee shop?'"
For all this talk of circulation cores and wandering nerds, buildings still must be built, campuses arranged. This requires planning - planning for change per se. In human organizations, this means the ability to rip up the plans and reallocate resources in a hurry. But in architecture, such creative destruction results in an unsubstantial, unpleasant and ultimately very costly environment.
The architect's new rule of thumb is be unprogrammatic. "The generic college hall takes change beautifully," Scott Brown explains. "It has been all sorts of things: dormitories, administrative space, classrooms, you name it." Why? "It has an even beat of columns, and they are generously spaced, and they are strong. And the windows are well-spaced, allowing you to put partitions in different places, and they give you ample light."
If that sounds like a Soho loft, it is. Throughout the '90s, high-tech's home has been the retrofitted 19th-century warehouse. It turns out that, even on the cutting edge, readiness for the new thing isn't as important as indifference to the current thing. Which is why 19th-century architects build the best computer-age buildings. Planning requires the foresight, the breadth of vision - the old-fashioned wisdom - to realize that what we know about today might not tell us anything about tomorrow.
Hal Cohen is a writer and urban planner in New York.
