ity. 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 piazza, it could be the church; and in a college quadrangle, it might be the library, a chapel, or the main gymnasium — places that many will use or visit.
The most successful examples of these major gathering places involve a type of layering: the primary exterior pedestrian path mirroring or reinforcing the path of circulation within the building; the main reading room of the library looking out over the quadrangle; the main dining hall offering views over a campus open space. All of these situations can enable a gentle intertwining, a choreography that reinforces the communal nature of the college campus.
The communal campus
Why does the physical setting of a campus matter? And how do we develop it successfully? The Turner prototypes show that American campuses are derived from planning solutions that already worked as community settings.
To improve and enhance an American campus, the first step is to understand the existing identity of the campus. Is the plan clear? Is it legible? Is it understood by the members of the campus community? Are there rules of engagement? For instance, are particular materials preferred? It is often clear when you first see a campus that it either works as an identifiable place, or it does not. We cannot attribute this to any specific flaw or virtue, but the most common reason for failure is to have a series of individual object buildings — those unrelated to each other or to the landscape they occupy — designed to attract attention to themselves, and then hope that collectively they become a place. In some cases, the worst offending buildings might be eliminated or transformed.
As an example, consider I.M. Pei’s Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University from 1973. The museum is adjacent to the Arts Quad. The buildings that surround the Arts Quad are relatively similar, Neoclassical buildings constructed in gray stone. The Johnson Museum stands on pillars and is almost white so as to advertise its unique identity. It is not part of the collective aesthetic of the campus. Of course, 