Universities offer many lessons. For a quick one on the short life of design trends, you might have taken a stroll this winter among the old maple trees and Georgian buildings of New Hampshire's Dartmouth College. Near the center of campus - amid the dirt heaps and dust flurries and yellow tape warning of asbestos removal - is the site of the future Baker/Berry Library.
Two buildings stood here. One was Dartmouth's original, beloved Baker Library, built in 1929 - a lovely old pile of bricks made to look like an even older colonial vestige. The other, the Kiewit Computation Center, was a whiz-bang, late-'60s state-of-the-art exercise in high-function design - a greatly admired example of modernist efficiency in the service of human progress.
The most interesting thing about the site is the building that's still standing. Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, the architecture firm behind the new Baker/Berry, was hired to create the most advanced library design possible, so they made a perfectly reasonable yet utterly perverse decision: They would renovate musty old Baker and demolish space-age Kiewit.
Universities are no better than the rest of us at predicting the future. But they are good at making mistakes before everyone else does. They are the most wired (and increasingly wireless) places in this country. They are also among our most deliberately planned physical spaces, and trends often take hold in campus design before they appear in the larger world. How the campus is changing - why a new and wired library, for example, will work better in a 70-year-old no-tech building than a 25-year-old high-tech one - can explain much about what is in store for the rest of us.
Kiewit, in fact, was defined by its once-cutting-edge technological core: a General Electric GE-235 computer housed in a climate-controlled central "machine room." Office and lab locations were determined by proximity to the computer. Floors were raised to make way for the thick cables that linked the central computer to the workstations. It was a brain in a box. As the years went by, the brain was upgraded and replaced, but the box remained the same, an increasingly constricting shell that could not grow with its residents. Denise Scott Brown - author, theorist and half of Venturi, Scott Brown - crystallizes the problem: "How do you design for changes that you cannot foretell?"
The answer, it turns out, can be found in Baker Library. More specifically, it can be found in the long collegiate tradition of molding - and restraining - human nature. Among the first college students were the gentry of medieval Oxford and Cambridge. In a break with monastic tradition, these students initially lived in town. But town-gown tensions, in the form of a collegiate predilection for brawling and whoring, soon led to a different approach. The New College at Oxford, founded in 1379, established the so-called Oxbridge system. Professors and students ate, slept and learned in a defensible, enclosed quadrangle.
At first, Colonial colleges in land-rich America replaced the urban-fortress quad with open green space - even Harvard's seemingly timeless Oxbridge-style campus began with a scattering of buildings in a field.
In 1817, construction began on what is usually regarded as the first designed campus, Thomas Jefferson's "academical village" at the University of Virginia (pictured above). Its central lawn was surrounded on three sides by colonnaded buildings that housed students, professors and classes; the fourth side was left open to the world. Even as campuses went through a building boom around the end of the 19th century, old schools like Harvard reaffirmed their pedigrees by constructing new quads in historical English styles. Arriviste, robber-baron-endowed universities also built faux-old buildings in the hope that it would give them instant legitimacy. Throughout, though, the emphasis was on openness, socialization and continuity.
It was not until after World War II that campus design underwent truly radical change. New, inexpensive construction methods - steel framing, prefab facades, drop ceilings - made "durability" and "permanence" dirty words in architecture. The new ideals were expedience and expendability. Parking lots replaced public space, and "inefficient" locations for face-to-face social interaction were phased out. Campuses looked like Class-B office parks, with throw-away structures designed for the technology of the moment. The grand turn-of-the-century buildings, built to last long into an unknown future, were derided as dinosaurs. Many hundreds of building like Kiewit were erected. Few of them were as well designed.
