American college campuses are full of memorable buildings — Jefferson’s Rotunda at the U. of Virginia, Charles Z. Klauder’s Heinz Chapel at the U. of Pittsburgh, Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink at Yale U. You could spend a month listing them and still miss many favorites. Often, though, the lessons that stick with you and prove useful over the long term come from buildings that aren’t campus icons, and campuses that aren’t Jefferson’s. I’ve been writing about campus architecture for more than 30 years now, and I’ve probably been on as many campus tours as almost anyone. But some buildings, and some campuses, stick in my mind because they’ve taught me something that seems universal.
Davidson College’s twin literary-society buildings, Philanthropic and Eumenean Halls, face each other across one end of the college’s small original quadrangle. Their architects are unknown, and their proportions are off, at least by the standards of the Greek temples that seem to have served as their inspirations. Each has an elaborate meeting room above a set of smaller rooms that originally held each society’s library, collections, and offices. They are modest by comparison with subsequent Davidson undertakings — especially the gargantuan structure that Alexander Jackson Davis, the starchitect of the era, designed for the college in the 1850s (only a portion of his design was ever built, and it burned down in 1921). But these two delightfully civilized structures for student-led debating societies address each other directly both in purpose and design, and could not be better reminders — to the students they were built for or those of today — of the values of the liberal arts.
In 1985 the Postmodern architect Michael Graves completed renovations to Emory U. originally designed by Henry Hornbostel, the prolific Pittsburgh architect who founded the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon U. The renovations converted what had been a law-school building into anarchaeology museum, and even though it wasn’t particularly large, Graves filled it with enough architecture for a museum 10 times its size. A gallery not much bigger than a generous closet had a domed ceiling, a detailed Postmodern cornice, and perfectly designed lighting; a stair leading up to the second floor curved around a first-floor gallery and offered little windows to look down on it as you climbed. Graves also had the floorplans of classical buildings painted onto the floor — a trick he picked up from Hornbostel’s College of Fine Arts Building at Carnegie Mellon. The takeaway: Great architecture doesn’t have to be big.
Speaking of Postmodern architects, Charles Moore’s early-1980s design for the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College was a work of genius. The site Dartmouth had chosen was bounded on one side by a Richardsonian Romanesque former library and on the other by the Modernist columns of Wallace K. Harrison’s 1962 Hopkins Center. What to do? Moore brought visitors down a curving walk, through a beguiling set of Postmodern pilasters that seemed to have been chiseled out of the building behind, and under a copper-sheathed bridge, after which they found themselves in a secluded courtyard surrounded by traditional New England rooflines. The lesson, it seemed, was that tough challenges can inspire great design.
Alas, the museum outgrew Moore’s facility, and there were complaints that Moore’s entrance was so subtle that visitors couldn’t find it. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien were hired for a major renovation and expansion, completed earlier this year. Imagine their predicament: They had to deal with not only the Romanesque former library and the Wallace Harrison building, but Moore’s as well — and Tsien had been a student of his in architecture school. Their solutions to those challenges removed parts of Moore’s design but kept others, and are worth visiting to see.
It’s not the design that matters, it’s how users experience the design. You could drive to Swarthmore College. Plenty of people do. But you’d be missing one of the great entrance experiences in American higher education: the walk from the train station up the hill to Parrish Hall. The broad pathway, called Magill Walk, is lined by towering old trees and interrupted every so often by flights of stairs to slow you down and give you time to look around (two handsome dorms by William Rawn Associates are on your right). On a campus map, the walk is just a line; a photo wouldn’t do it justice. In person, though, Magill Walk is rich with anticipation.
The Illinois Institute of Technology is famous for its collection of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe buildings, including Crown Hall, one of his spare triumphs. But the building that really makes an impression is the McCormick Campus Center, opened in 2003 to a plan by Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas was determined to design for the students who would be the building’s daily users, so he located it right where the most student-used routes crossed — which happened to be right beneath an elevated train line. (No problem: The tracks are enclosed in a giant, sound-deadening tube.) The interior is full of game tables, food offerings, and hangout options, all in colors that may seem garish if you’re not an undergraduate. If you are an undergraduate, though, it’s the place to be: On a recent visit I found it packed and lively. The conclusion’s not hard to draw: Know whom you’re building for, and build for them.
Princeton U. has so many terrific buildings — William Appleton Potter’s Chancellor Green Library, Cope & Stewardson’s Blair Hall, Denise Scott Brown’s Gordon Wu Hall, Steven Holl’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and many more — that choosing the best would be impossible if it weren’t for Whig Hall. Built in the 1890s as one of a matched pair of literary-society buildings, it suffered a disastrous fire in 1969. Hired to rebuild it, the architect Charles Gwathmey shoehorned a delight in behind its classical front. Stare at the columns and steps from the front, and you’d be none the wiser; walk around the building’s left side, and there’s a brief essay in Modernism framed by the original marble. The rule for campus buildings ought to be: the more creative, the better.
Bowdoin College’s tidy campus is a catalog of architectural pleasures — an 1855 chapel by Richard Upjohn, a 1995 student center by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in a former field house — but head to the southwest corner of the main quadrangle for the highlight: a three-building conversation across 113 years. In the center is the Walker Art Building, from 1894, the acknowledged masterpiece of Charles Follen McKim (who was routinely overshadowed by his partner Stanford White). It has everything you could ask for in an art museum, including a dome and lions to guard the stairs.
Then, in the 1970s, Edward Larrabee Barnes was hired to put up a Visual Arts Center next door. He designed not just a building but a Modernist answer to McKim, fitted precisely to McKim’s dimensions. And then, in the early 2000s, the firm Machado Silvetti was brought in to renovate the McKim building and create a new, accessible entrance for it. The firm’s glass entry pavilion, on the side opposite the Barnes building, borrows Barnes’s V-shaped entryway, casts it up two stories high, and folds it along the pavilion’s top. Jefferson famously wanted his campus for the U. of Virginia to teach its students about classical architecture. This trio of buildings does even better, teaching about design across more than a century.
A few years ago I was driving across North Carolina and stopped in downtown Statesville in search of decent coffee. At the far end of Broad Street I spotted a handsome white building that instinct told me had to be a college. Latte in hand, I walked down to investigate, and discovered the beautiful little campus of Mitchell Community College. The main building, with cream brick walls and a white Doric porch, was put up shortly before the Civil War. The grassy quadrangle spread out in front of it has a small library and a small student center facing two academic buildings. Compact though it is, it’s as attractive as any campus I’ve seen, and reminded me of architecture’s great capacity to inspire and ennoble, even on the campus of a modest community college far from any famous center of learning.
It’s been a pleasure writing Campus Spaces. Here’s wishing you all great and sustainable design (and, of course, reduced deferred maintenance).
