Architect Breaks Down the Most Common Styles of College Campus | Architectural Digest

People often say that college is the best four years of your life, but it was also likely that it was some of the best architecture you've been around as well. I'm Michael Weitzner, and I've been an architect for over 35 years. And today we're going to look at the five most common styles of university architecture. So what is it about university architecture that gives you a feeling you can only get on campus? There are some things that nearly all college campuses have in common. For one thing, they all work like a self-contained city. And that's because nearly all of them share a common design starting point. The quadrangle, or as it's known today, the quad. For centuries, learning was largely the monopoly of the religious orders. And architecturally, this manifested itself in the cloisters and monasteries of monks. These monasteries were self-contained groups of buildings, typically connected to a cathedral, and also providing housing, study chambers, and dining halls. And all of these buildings were connected around an interior courtyard, known as a cloister or a garb. This later became the model for today's college quadrangle, or quad. Two of the earliest universities founded in the Western world used these cloisters as a model. So Oxford was founded nearly a thousand years ago, in 1096. And Cambridge followed just a hundred years later, in 1209. In fact, Jesus College at Cambridge started off as a monastery. But even though almost all universities share these elements, campus architecture comes in a wide variety of styles. So let's take a look at some of the most common styles of collegiate architecture in the U.S. First up, the colonial style. The first university founded in the United States was Harvard, in 1636. Which means it wasn't even the United States yet. It was still Britain. In fact, Cornell was the only Ivy League school built after the Declaration of Independence. So it makes sense that all these universities were built in the British style of the time, which was Georgian, named after the King's George. And speaking of the Declaration of Independence, the author of that great document was Thomas Jefferson, who was also the founder and architect of the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was a great and flawed and complicated human being. He was a lawyer, he was a scientist, a philosopher, a writer, a revolutionary, an ambassador, a governor, a secretary of state, a vice president, and a president. And he was also a slave owner. Although he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he never lived up to its strong words about equality and freedom. Despite his well-documented moral failings, he was also indisputably one of the greatest architects of the colonial era. So let's take a look at Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia. So this was built in 1819. So here's everything that jumps out at me. Jefferson designed it in this quasi-Georgian style, but it's really more Palladian, referring to the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio. And Palladio based his architecture on classical Greek and Roman architecture. Straight away is the Rotunda, which is obviously based on the Pantheon in Rome, with its dome and its columns impediment over the entrance. The other thing Jefferson did was he built what he called an academical village, and he built it around this stepped courtyard. And you could see this courtyard stepping up. And in the other direction, he opened it up to the view of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Later, that view was blocked by a building by McKim, Mead & White, which is really one of the most regretful architectural mistakes. These buildings were made from red brick. In fact, the columns, which appear to be stone, are actually built from brick as well, plastered over, and then painted. And many buildings in colonial America were built from red brick. In fact, in Britain at the time, the term red brick university was used to describe newer schools that came after the venerated Oxford and Cambridge. So let's take a look at the plan of the university. So what we just saw in that previous photograph was that Pantheon-like building called the Rotunda right here, which is the library. And then there were those arcaded wings that were built around this stepped lawn in the center. And then he built two outer wings on either side called the Hotels, where people lived. In fact, Edgar Allan Poe lived there when he attended the university. And between these wings and the hotel wings was called the Range, which was just filled with these gardens. And within that range created his famous undulating brick walls. The other thing that Jefferson does, which is so interesting, is he creates these pavilions to interrupt the long arcade. And each pavilion references a building from the Roman Forum. Jefferson had help with the design of the university from Benjamin Latrobe and Dr. William Thornton. In fact, Benjamin Latrobe is considered the first professional architect in the United States. But ironically, after the U.S. declared independence, newer schools wanted to look older. So let's take a look at the next wave of university styles in the U.S. Collegiate Gothic. The Collegiate Gothic style is probably one of the most familiar to the over 170 million Americans who hold a college degree. There are countless examples of university buildings from every decade built in this style, including Duke University Chapel, Washington University in St. Louis, City College in New York City, the University of Chicago, and the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, which is actually the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere. As recently as 2017, Yale built yet another building in the Collegiate Gothic style. But although these buildings wanted to make themselves appear older and more prestigious, many of them didn't even use a lot of the Gothic elements, other than making themselves out of masonry and stone. So typically what became the Collegiate Gothic style were buildings that were built out of masonry, brick, locally sourced stone, whose openings were trimmed with limestone and had limestone ornament at the roof and other places on the building. And really the first Collegiate Gothic building in the United States was the building known as Old Kenyon, the residence hall at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1824. Okay, so here's everything that jumps out at me. The pieces that employ Gothic architecture really only include the series of windows at the uppermost floor that use the pointed Gothic arch, these spires that you see on all the corners and at the top of the gable, and this main spire that you would also see on a church. It's also built out of stone, which nearly all Gothic architecture was built out of. And these windows at the top that use the pointed Gothic arch and also use the Gothic tracery in the uppermost sash in the window. The parts of the building that are not Gothic are much more abundant. Most of the windows actually are not Gothic at all. In fact, they just have a traviated opening using a flat lintel. They also have these very pronounced dormers along the roof line, and they also have these crenelated chimneys. Crenelations became part of the Collegiate Gothic language, but were never really part of Gothic architecture. They're more medieval. They created these slots for soldiers to use bows and arrows against their enemies. So this is an example of a building that uses sort of a sprinkling of Gothic elements, but it's a far cry from a true Collegiate Gothic building. So let's take a look at a building that was built almost 100 years later that's far more faithful to the Gothic style. In fact, it looks like it could be the bell tower of a Gothic church in Germany or France. Well, first off, it's made out of stone. Secondly, it has these buttresses that hold up the building, which was traditional in all Gothic architecture. It has these statues, which were also used to ornament Gothic churches. It has the pointed arch windows with the fine tracery stonework between them, and you can even see the gargoyles sticking out almost at the top. So this really looks like an old-fashioned Gothic tower. In fact, there was a legend at the campus that they used acid to wash the stone to make it look even older, when in fact most people believe they just used dirty construction water. So if you compare these two buildings, you can really see the great range of Collegiate Gothic style on campuses. But not every college wants to look like a piece of history. So let's take a look at the next major style to take campuses by storm. Modernism. Let's talk about the Illinois Institute of Technology, a new campus designed from scratch in the 1940s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies had run the Bauhaus in Germany after Walter Gropius and Hans Meyer from 1930 to 1933 until it was shut down by the Nazis, who viewed its curriculum as degenerate and un-German. At that point, Mies fled to the United States, where he was courted by the Illinois Institute of Technology. Not since Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia in 1819 had an American campus been the work of a single architect. Instead of designing the buildings around a central open space or quad, he embraced the idea of the Chicago street grid and created two separate groupings of buildings, one north of 33rd Street and one south. Okay, so this is a typical building on the IIT campus. And you can see they're all two to three stories tall. They employ brick and glass. He uses a 24 by 24 foot module that you can see here. And you can see how the steel is expressed, so you know how the building is constructed. They all have flat roofs. And this style of architecture was so influential, nearly every high school in the United States that was built in the 50s and 60s looks almost exactly like this. You can see it's completely stripped of ornament. It's very rational, which was a hallmark of architectural modernism. For 16 years, between 1929 and 1945, basically no new ground was broken on new buildings in the U.S. and Europe because of the war and the Depression before it. And when building resumed, design and public appreciation of architectural aesthetics jumped from imitating antiquity to cutting-edge modernism. Campuses were no longer interested in looking old. It was a new world and time to embrace the future. And to some, the old world became associated with the atrocities of the war. And so many schools started to build more and more modernist buildings. Early modernism was political as well as aesthetic and associated with utopianism. It endeavored to create a clean, healthy, egalitarian new world. But that idea was wrecked by the realities of World War II. So modernism now was no longer about this sort of utopian world. And modernism just became another style. It was about rationalism, functionality, and hygiene. In fact, many of these buildings were criticized for looking all the same and looking like factories. So let's talk about the most famous building on the campus, which really stands out. And that's the architecture school called Crown Hall. Crown Hall is one of the most famous modern buildings in the world. And it was completed in 1956. And what's different about this building is that it's made out of glass. But the most distinctive thing he did at Crown Hall was he put the beams that support the roof on top of the roof. So the interior has absolutely no columns. And when you walk in, it is this one soaring plane of a ceiling which creates this really exhilarating effect. Mies is famous for sort of breaking open the box. So before, to create space or a room, typically architects used four walls. You entered in, and you were in a room. But Mies did something different. He broke those walls apart, and he just used planes. So to create space, he put a wall here, and then he put a wall here, and then he put another wall here, like he did at the Barcelona Pavilion. And all of a sudden, you've created a whole new way of space making. And he was the son of a stonemason. And so quite often, he employed these beautiful materials, some of them stone, some of them exotic woods. And he created these beautiful, meandering spaces defined by these beautiful planes. Next up, Brutalism, the Richards Medical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, a building that paved the way for the plethora of brutalist buildings on campuses across America. So this building was completed in 1961 by another giant of late 20th century architecture by the name of Louis Kahn. And the thing about Kahn was he was almost like this guru, and he was an existentialist who believed in the power and the poetry of architecture, and that's significant. He had all these great aphorisms about architecture, and perhaps his most famous was, when you ask a brick what it wants to be, it responds, I like an arch. The building was completed by 1961, and it's made out of brick. And he took sort of the precepts of modernism, response to programmatic need, functionalism, and an honest expression of materials, and created a new kind of architecture. And one of the significant things he did here was he separated served and servant spaces. He created places for the technologies that are required to serve modern buildings. So exhaust towers and fresh air intakes and electrical bus duct runs were all taken outside on the building, and you could see that in these towers that run on the outside. And that was actually an idea that he derived from, believe it or not, Palladio from the 16th century, where he was looking at Palladio's famous Villa Rotunda and realized, wow, that central space is actually served by the spaces around it. Another thing that really influenced the design of this building was the Italian hill town of San Gimignano, which had all these beautiful towers, of which these towers that he created on the outside of the building for the exhaust and intake of air are very reminiscent. This building was so influential that there was an exhibition devoted entirely to this one building at the Museum of Modern Art, where they stated it was probably the single most consequential building constructed in the United States since World War II. It certainly became one of the most influential. Nearly every college campus in the U.S. has a building that was imitating it. The other thing this building does is it sort of opens the door to brutalism. And by that I mean it's got large expanses of undifferentiated material. In this case, it's brick. But of course, the term brutalist was coined by another influential architect, Le Corbusier. So this is the Carpenter Center at Harvard by Corbusier. It was completed in 1963. It's constructed from poured-in-place concrete, and it's considered an example of brutalism in the United States. Corbusier sort of coined the term for brutalism with his poured-in-place concrete housing project in Marseille. In fact, the term brutalism comes from the term Breton Brou, which means raw concrete in French. So Corbusier essentially invented this brutalist style, and it became wildly popular on college campuses. So these two buildings by Kahn and Corbusier were hugely influential. But some of Kahn's later buildings, where he started to incorporate historical references more obviously, leads to a whole other style of architecture, and that's postmodernism. So the progression into postmodernism is best exemplified by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Gordon Woo Hall at Princeton University. Venturi wrote a book called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which was a real groundbreaking work in 1966. One might say it changed the aesthetics of architecture from minimalism to maximalism. Postmodernism is sort of a return to using historical references in architecture. Some people did it really quite cleverly, like Venturi and Scott Brown, and others did it more clumsily, where it just became sort of a watered-down version of historical architecture. So this building was built for Butler College, and it contains a dining hall, and it contains some offices, a lounge, and spaces like that, and a library. And the idea of it was to unify the different buildings of Butler College. And right next door you can just catch a glimpse of one of the existing collegiate Gothic buildings that had already existed. The first thing they did was they created these big bay windows that relate to that collegiate Gothic building. These sort of bay windows with the stone dividers between them is a classic motif of collegiate Gothic architecture. And then they also throw in this Palladian window, another reference to Palladio, at the center above the shed roof, which is really funny because you don't really see that in collegiate Gothic architecture. And then they also have this sort of band of ornamented brick that terminates, or is interrupted, I should say, by this scupper that's circular and outlined in stone trim as well. And then above the entrance they overlap different images, and they take these sort of cartoon versions of historic forms, some of which can be seen at Kahn's building at DACA, these triangles and circles, for instance. One of the funniest things they do in the building, and most clever thing, they recess the entry, and then that entry sort of becomes this huge expanse of glass along the ground floor, and that opening is obviously held up by this very long concealed steel lintel, which is out of view. But what they do to be sort of clever and funny is then they put these sort of cartoon versions in stone of a keystone that would normally be the centerpiece of an arch that would support an opening like this. But obviously that arch is not necessary because of the steel. So they're sort of making references to history of how buildings used to be built, how buildings are currently built, and they're very clever the way they do it. So in the same way that Venturi pulls from all different styles in one building, today campuses are composed of buildings in a variety of styles. Almost every campus has expanded from the day it was first founded, and as they grow, they tend to incorporate more architectural styles depending on the fashion of the day, the type of education happening inside, or even the type of students and donors they want to attract. In fact, it is most likely that any given campus of a certain size will feature at least one building in each of these five styles. Let us know what your favorite collegiate style is in the comments below.