 paths appeared, and deciduous shade trees were planted.
The main communal space at Harvard College is the Harvard Yard — an academic Village Green. The word “yard” refers to the green grass that covers the surface, just as the green grass covered the surface of the early town greens in America. The Harvard Yard includes dormitories, classroom buildings, the library and the chapel. It is the place where the community comes together.
Monasteries in Europe date from the early Middle Ages. A prototypical 8th-century plan for St. Gall in Switzerland includes a cloister surrounded by Monks’ cells, a library, a chapel and a dining room. The community of monks lived together, ate together, worked together, and prayed together. When the idea of a college or university came to Europe in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, the original teachers were monks.
At Oxford University in England, a prototypical college plan developed that closely resembled the plan of the monastery. The students were children of the wealthy and powerful; they lived in rooms around a cloister, just as the monks did. Situated around the cloister were the library, the chapel, and the dining hall. Oxford University is an assemblage of many separate residential colleges, each resembling a monastery, that have been sited and intertwined over hundreds of years.
This tradition of European colleges, such as Oxford and Cambridge, came to the United States at the end of the 19th-century as part of the Gothic Revival movement. At Yale University, between 1920 and 1940, eight residential colleges were constructed on the Oxford model. The significance of the monastic or ecclesiastical quadrangle is that a prototypical community model was transferred to an academic setting. The young men at Oxford in the Middle Ages became part of a community of students and teachers, as did the young men at Yale in the first half of the 20th century.
A sense of place
For a college campus to succeed as an educational community, there must be a sense of place and unique identity. That sense of collective place is unequivocally present at the University of Virginia. When you are on the lawn, looking uphill to Jefferson’s library, you know where you are. When you walk out of your student room along the colonnade, you know where you are. And you know where you are when you go to one of the professor’s houses to find your classroom. At Columbia University, the central grandiose quadrangle facing toward Low Memorial Library holds the entire campus together. You might not remember any individual building other than the library, but you do remember the sense of place with the red brick and limestone.
Some campuses are unified with stylistic rigidity. At the end of the 19th century, Grosvenor Atterbury, architect, and Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect, designed Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The pattern of orthogonal-linked quadrangles and Spanish Colonial architecture is pervasive and unifying. Other campuses are more diverse architecturally and spatially, but still hold together. The Harvard Yard unifies such diverse buildings as Richardson’s Sever Hall (Romanesque revival), the Memorial Church, (Neoclassical) and the red brick freshman dormitories. All of these varied structures are in tune with the collective nature of the Village Green — the Harvard Yard.
The choreography of communal activity
Just because buildings and outdoor spaces relate to a certain prototype does not mean they will be successful. More is required. Outdoor space and outdoor circulation have to be planned so that the they are occupied by students and faculty, lingering or walking from place to place. Indoor circulation often relates to outdoor spaces. For example, students passing through corridors that face out to the quadrangle might observe the activities in that outdoor space.
The Roman Forum and the Renaissance piazza were places for civic purpose and commerce. When planning commercial centers, the anchors are important. The anchor in the forum might be the temple; in the Renaissance piaz