The Old College Try

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:00:00 -0700

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.

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.

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The Old College Try