What do we mean by community in an academic setting? And how can the campus setting support or reinforce the idea of community? Usually, communities survive because a group of people have a common purpose. This might describe the situation in a village, where the citizens work together to make their community thrive. In a college situation, the faculty, staff and students have a common purpose: to educate the students, to support scholarship and inquiry, and to help the college thrive.
For the community to exist, it needs collective endeavors — a group of people helping to make the village center more beautiful or more effective as a business district. The collective effort at a college or university might be directed toward academic excellence, attracting students to the campus, raising the level of scholarship, improving the physical environment.
In the age of the Internet and online courses, it is conceivable that students might exist in a virtual community, learning and receiving college degrees without meeting any of their classmates. While that situation might be expedient, it eliminates the benefits of common endeavor. For example, when you enter the main reading room at the Harvard Law School Library, a palpable energy arises from the students working at the long tables. That energy comes from the intensity of their efforts and the subdued clatter of multiple keyboards. In schools of architecture, students work in a common studio, perhaps where as few as 12 or as many as 150 classmates may be visible to each other. They could be working together on one design project or individually on different projects, but the presence of others working in a similar manner increases the energy level in the studio. Many other activities on college campuses, such as eating, socializing, entertainment and cultural events, can work to contribute to the sense of community and common purpose.
Communal space prototypes
In his book, Campus: An American Planning Tradition, Paul Venable Turner cites three precedents that have determined the physical form of most American campuses: the Roman Forum, the Village Green and the Monastery. (Most American campuses are based on combinations of these precedents.)
The Roman Forum
The Roman Forum was the major outdoor space of the Roman Colonial town that spread throughout the empire. Typically the forum was an elongated rectangular space surrounded by colonnades on three sides and focusing to a temple or other important civic building at one end. The forum in Pompeii, for instance, follows this model with the focal point being the Temple of Jupiter. This type of open space was revived in Italy during the Renaissance, notably at the 15th-century Piazza Ducale in Vegevano, where three sides are used for commercial purposes with residential uses above; the focal point is the church.
Thomas Jefferson’s design for the campus at the University of Virginia is based on the Roman Forum idea. He designed his forum as a terraced lawn with an open end to view the mountains beyond. The long sides are colonnades in front of student rooms and faculty houses. Within the faculty houses at the lowest floor level are the classrooms. At the uphill end of this 19th-century forum is a building that resembles a Roman temple; it originally housed the college library. It is noteworthy that Jefferson borrowed a communal prototype from ancient times, borrowed residential use from the Renaissance, and initiated a new mixture of activities in a rural setting in America.
The Village Green
The Village Green is an American creation, although it, too, has ancient antecedents. It was common, especially in New England towns, to reserve a green space at the center of the gridded plan. The earliest greens were reserved for grazing, but around these greens, civic buildings started to appear. These included churches, libraries, post offices, town halls, banks, sometimes a school or college. As the greens evolved, the presence of these civic endeavors contributed to the culture of collective purpose. Gradually, grazing ceased, diagonal