termined 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 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 ident