Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur!
With the name changed, the story applies to you!
—Horace

FROM IMAGE TO TYPE: THE IDEA OF COLLEGE

Until the sixteenth century, college, and education as a whole, were related more to an abstract idea, rather than an architectural artefact or specific type. This aspect can be clearly observed in two very different images from the early 1500s, the period when education was illustrated in its highest degree of realism. The first, titled The Student’s Progress, is an engraving and frontispiece for Margarita Philosophica—the first printed encyclopedia, completed in 1503 by the Carthusian German prior, Gregor Reish. The second is Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens (1509-11), commissioned for the Pope’s personal library by Pope Julius II, who wanted an allegorical representation of the four faculties of medieval universities: theology, philosophy, law, and poetry.

The Student’s Progress takes as its main subject the illustration of a typical university college in the Middle Ages, particularly emphasizing the university’s organization. The pedagogical structure of medieval colleges, diagrammatically shown in the drawing, was based on the classical education model of the seven liberal arts. Taught according to the philosophical method of medieval scholasticism, the liberal arts were subdivided in the two successive stages, the trivium and the quadrivium. Reisch’s frontispiece offered a schematic representation of this organization. Nicostrata, the Roman goddess of childbirth and inventor of the Latin alphabet, appears in the center of the image, welcoming a young student ready to make his entrance in the college. Drawn as an unusually gothic tower, every level of the building shows a different stage of the medieval university: grammar was placed on the ground floor, represented by Donatus; the next levels show the other subjects of the trivium, such as logic, represented by Aristotle; above are the subjects of the quadrivium, such as arithmetic, represented by Boethius; geometry by Euclid; astronomy by Ptolemy; philosophy and moral science by Pliny and Seneca; the last level being theology, the most important subject crowning the edifice in conclusion of the university cycle. Every level was precisely structured in a way that was coherent with how contemporary scholasticism was influencing both the structural organization of learning, as well as the production of gothic architecture such as colleges, monasteries, and cathedrals.

Medieval colleges were typically dominated by the use of courtyards and cloisters. In Reisch’s frontispiece, however, this spatial characteristic was substituted, instead choosing to depict the collegium as a tower. Imagining the college as a gothic tower directly relates to the genre of the publication and content of the encyclopedia. As an architectural representation the tower reinforced the monumental importance of the knowledge contained within the novel work. Further, the engraving can be considered as a symbolic, almost ideogrammatic, representation. In this sense Margarita Philosophica emphasizes the university college’s underlying pedagogical modus operandi, rather than describing student life or the space of the university.

Similarly, Raphael’s depiction of the The School of Athens also has a symbolic character. Starting from a more classical and humanist tradition, Raphael represents the universal idea of knowledge as a synthetic exercise, supporting the centrality of higher education within Papal Rome. Like Reisch, Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens, proposed a gathering of important figures, ranging from philosophers, both ancient and modern, to teachers. The fresco’s composition focuses on a conversation between Plato and Aristotle. The left side of the painting depicts Socrates, Alcibiades on the upper level; while on the lower left Pythagoras together with the Arab polymath Averroes are seen gathering with a group of students; on the right are Zoroaster and Ptolemy, representing astronomy; just below them is again Euclid, resembling Donato Bramante, in front of a group of students, discussing the importance of measuring and architectural design.

It is precisely an architecture from Bramante, perhaps the Basilica of Saint Peter, that forms the symposium’s hypothetical setting, giving the work both an ideal and symbolic atmosphere. However, the assembly shown in the fresco could have taken place anywhere, with the same or different figures composed in many different ways, such as elsewhere in Rome, being it rather a Basilica, a college courtyard, or a piazza. Unlike Reisch’s symbolism, Raphael put forward a more realistic scene of college life. The School of Athens presented an image not so distant from the rituals of medieval colleges, themselves based on a continuous manifestation of events, debates and disputes that typically took place in the halls, classrooms and courtyards.

On one hand, Reisch’s engraving presents an organizational diagram of European educational pedagogy, arranging the same philosophers according to their teaching functions. On the other hand, Raphael relies on a more confused meeting, focused mainly on gestures, body language, dialogues and the abstraction of human interactions. Consequently, Raphael reinforces the aura through which the hermetic environment of universities was publicly perceived.

These two depictions of the university are symptomatic of the fact that, until the seventeenth century, the idea of college did not have a very solid architectural understanding in official representations. Since Roman times, the term collegium—whose etymology is a combination of the words Cum, meaning “together,” and Legere, meaning “to collect,” and “to select,”—did not refer to a random-oriented community of people, but, on the contrary, collegium indicated a selective idea of collectivity. In legal Latin, the term was used to define an association of people grouped according to common interests. With the rise of the University Movement in Europe during the twelfth century, the term college was still considered generic, and less used in academic environments. Instead, Universitas was used to identify a community of faculty members and scholars. In the thirteenth century, universities acquired a more institutional character, receiving the official title of Studium Generale, given by both the Emperor and the Pope. It was in the fourteenth century that the meaning of college shifted. College began to refer to a more complex structure, now including teachers, administrators and other faculty members, as well as the physical spaces used for teaching and administration. The term collegium, especially in Italy, France and England, began developing an architectural dimension, giving birth to the radical resemantization of a characteristic European type, until then mainly related to Christian monasteries: the courtyard.

What follows is an attempt to trace the genealogy of the university college, vis-à-vis the history of the medieval courtyard and its gradual disintegration followed by the invention of the American modern campus. Running parallel to this genealogy, the essay analyses the emergence of a specific subject: the student, who today has become a fundamental social figure.

THE MEDIEVAL CLOISTER AND THE STUDENT AS A MONK

The first medieval European universities were based on two main paradigms: the Studium of Bologna and the Studium of Paris. The first was structured as a guild of students, where students determined both the organization and the decision-making process of the Studium. Second, the Studium of Paris, on the contrary, was structured as a guild of professors, where teachers were responsible for the decisions and the organization of the curricula. Even in the Parisian model, students still played an important role as their demands were very much considered by the city and the university. As it is well-known, the medieval guilds arose with the origins of capitalism as part of the passage from feudalism to mercantilism and craftsmanship concentrated in the medieval city. The students’ guild became very strong in the main urban centers of Europe, especially in the Italian communes, pushing the administrations towards their basic needs.

During the Middle Ages students in urban environments entered university from the age of twelve or fifteen years old when they were seen as “little adults.” The number of these very young, and often undisciplined scholars, brought many problems related to behavioral control, distraction and lack of space for both lectures and housing to the attention of city administrators. In Paris the municipality attempted to use various forms of control over their life, and in the thirteenth century decided to concentrate them on the left bank of the Seine. In cities like Paris, Bologna, Siena, Oxford and Cambridge, lectures were still taking places in churches, while leaving students to be responsible for their own accommodation. This situation soon proved to be unsustainable.

Reacting to this initial chaotic moment, the two English towns of Oxford and Cambridge responded the most decisively in terms of organizing student life. In the fourteenth century, within a climate of conflictual relationships with France, the English king had called to court many English students studying in Paris and relocated them in Oxford and Cambridge, which were designated to be the main hubs for the production of knowledge in England. Soon, Oxford and Cambridge became successful models for “university-towns.” This success was due to the emergence of a new college type: the courtyard. The courtyard offered, from within its enclosure, accommodation for professors, students, caretakes as well as spaces for lectures, liturgical rituals, and other social facilities.

After the Plague of 1349, New College—founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester—was the first to be built according to a unitary plan. Immediately, the building became a model followed by other foundations, both for its organization and its typological application: the quadrangle. In previous foundations the quadrangle was a consequence of different additions over time around an empty space, depending on the spontaneous spatial and functional needs of colleges. New College, however, was designed as a quadrangle from the start, anticipating the architectural elements comprising a typical English college:

1. The gatehouse, marked by the presence of a belltower; the gatehouse housed the Warden, the person responsible for observing students while they left or entered the college.

2. The hall, where students gathered for meals and where public discussions and lecturers took place.

3. The chapel, where students attended mass; it was often in the chapel where academic ceremonies took place.

4. The library, which in many colleges became as important as the chapel.

5. The kitchen and other storage spaces.

6. The area of the chambers of students and teachers.

The success of the quadrangle was evident. This was partially clear since the beginning, when the main English universities and their colleges were located far from the city of London. Unlike Paris and Bologna, which had to deal with the presence of student accommodations within the structure of the city, English rulers also intended the two distant locations as a way to domesticate any potential conflict between town and gown. One after the other, the quadrangle manifested all its strengths and, at the same time, its vulnerabilities. Strength in the sense that the quadrangle remained, for more than four centuries, the only possible way for building colleges, from the simplest buildings, like that of Merton and Peterhouse College, to the most complex cases, like Christ Church in Oxford and Trinity in Cambridge. On the other side, the quadrangle’s vulnerability lay with the form’s high level of flexibility. This aspect could also be seen as a characteristic that helped create a strong urban identity in both towns, especially Cambridge. The courtyards of Cambridge, through their close aggregation in time, became almost fused and amalgamed with each other, combining their typological autonomy (typical at Oxford) with a new urban morphology. Not only the central quadrangle, but also the space in-between the college walls became habitable. Students could exit the medieval quadrangle, go from one college to the other, and openly circulate within the entire city. It took centuries for this to happen, despite a continuous attempt to suppress colleges by flattening any form of conflict or tensions between them and the city.

SAPIENZA: THE STUDENT BECOMES A COURTIER

The Renaissance period in Italy coincided with the rise of a different type of college: the “student palazzo.” The student palazzo, also known as sapienza, referred to a building that condensed both dwelling and certain teaching activities. In the history of education, the Renaissance represented a short parenthesis in terms of pedagogy and college typology, but also a very important breaking point with the previous tradition. The Renaissance, in this sense, corresponded to a reform of medieval scholasticism, fixing new ideological priorities based on humanism, aimed at bringing back classical philosophy and the rediscovery of ancient cultures. Yet, the problem with humanism was that it remained mainly confined to the families of patrons and rulers who could afford to invest in the education of their children and relatives, an education which often occurred within the courtyards of their lavish palazzi.

New centers of learning emerged on the map. The Italian peninsula was at the heart of this discourse, shifting the hubs of education from Paris, Bologna and Oxford to cities such as Florence, Ferrara, Siena, Padova or Rome. This passage from scholasticism to humanism, was paralleled by apparent new class differences. Even among scholars and teachers differentiations were introduced to mark the hierarchies upon which universities had to be structured. As noted by historian Jacque Le Goff, while twelfth century teachers were both socially and physically close to their students, Renaissance masters had to be distinguished from those they taught.

The palazzo embodied the new class exclusivity related to education. A new student subject was formed who had to be considered in the same way as the typical courtier being educated within the domestic sphere of patrons. As was typical of Renaissance Europe, in family palaces patrons acted as the protectors of intellectuals of court, including artists, philosophers and at times independent scholars. To imagine how a student and a courtier was, one could refer to The Book of the Courtier, by Baldassare Castiglione, published in 1528. Castiglione’s text, besides narrating the way courtiers were behaving (playing intellectual games or talking about philosophical questions), can be considered as one of the main sources to serve as a manual of how the perfetto cortegiano had to be. Not by chance, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his 1509 Praise of Folly, was critical of both Julius II (who commissioned Raphael’s fresco and was an emblem of the times of the scholar as a cortegiano) as well as of the figure of the courtier. For Erasmus, the courtier was servile and undisciplined, embodying all the negative sides of courtyards. Yet, unlike the undisciplined and lazy habits unfolding in family palaces, many colleges still relied on certain forms of discipline seen as necessary to educate the new emerging professional classes.

The close relationship between the nobility and education was reflected in the attention that architects gave to the design of new palazzi, designed not only for families but also students. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, was particularly interested in the “chollegi e sapienzie che sono il mantenimento degli Studii” [colleges for supporting young students during their studies]. In 1472 he donated 1,000 ducats to purchase a large house as a way to permit some younger members of his family to study at the university of Bologna. Significant decisions were undertaken in the university context of the humanist turn of the period, such as reestablishing the universities of Florence and Pisa and declaring new restrictions prohibiting Florence citizens from studying outside of Florence, including the Alberti family. Despite the impossibility of Leon Battista Alberti’s relatives moving to Bologna, his ambition was still to build the college and allocate it to the poor students of the city.

However, what Alberti may have had in mind for his sapienza was materialized a few decades later, in 1492, with two different projects by Giuliano da Sangallo and Francesco di Giorgio for the Sapienza of Siena. In both proposals, the two architects adapted the typical plan of a domestic palazzo for the purpose of student housing. Both their proposals put forward a series of typological modifications compared to the previous types of Oxford and Cambridge. These can be read as very radical adaptations of the many elements of the medieval cloister: the reduction of the quadrangle in the form of an intimate cortile (small courtyard), loggias repeated in all the floors, and the concentration in one side of the building block of all the collective facilities of the college. The most radical innovation was the introduction of individual student rooms. In this way, on one hand, both founders of the college and educators could exercise more precise control over students’ social life, and on the other, the introduction of individual cells corresponded to the scale of this new building type—a type whose main purpose was to reassemble a more domestic environment.

Giuliano da Sangallo’s proposal was even more radical in its reinterpretation of the palazzo/sapienza type, bringing two important innovations. First, he proposed an extremely schematic plan, based on a clear differentiation between private and public life. The first innovative element was the chapel itself. Unlike previous chapels, which were distinct architectures within the college plan, Sangallo designed a generic space, sharing same scale and language as the classrooms. The second innovation were the corridors which were used, possibly for the first time, to solve issues of privacy, circulation and noise control.

The introduction of these “dividing” elements, like corridors, loggias and the cellularization of dwellings, can be considered as part of a historical process of fragmentation. Colleges, especially when part of larger political projects, had often faced pressure from authorities to fragment both their autonomy and architectural form. One of the most significant examples of this was Giacomo Della Porta’s Sapienza in Rome, a project which was completed by Francesco Borromini’s 1642 design of the “university chapel” of Sant’Ivo. Replacing the now obsolete headquarters of Rome’s Studium Urbis, the new Sapienza was not only important because of the vicissitudes of its construction. It also showed the inclusion of a college building in Pope Leo X’s “strategic plan” for the transformation of the Piazza Navona area in Rome’s main papal center. This operation proposed a series of interventions around Piazza Navona, including new buildings and the regularization of public spaces. One of the main projects, put forward by Leo X, was the design for a new Palazzo for the Medici Family, a project that was later updated by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. According to Manfredo Tafuri’s reading of the project, Leo X, in an attempt to give to the city of Rome the same representational role as Florence, was referring to the symbolic value of combining Palatium and Circus (inspired by the Palatino and Circo Massimo). In this translatio imperii (transfer of power), Piazza Navona with its archeological form, replaced the role of the imperial circus, while Palazzo Medici, at the center of its composition, was intended as a new Palatino, serving as a point of contact between the Pope and the people of Rome. Here what is striking is the role assumed in Leo X’s urban strategy by the building of the Sapienza which in the papal magnificent project had to be located adjacent to Palazzo Medici.

From this moment, the Italian Sapienza assumed an ideological connotation, in a city which had previously never had a very strong college and university tradition compared to other Italian centers. It was this political and geographical context, together with Pope Leo X’s ambition to establish a secularized point of contact with the population of Rome, which influenced the palatial character of the (Bramantesque) architecture of Giacomo Della Porta’s project. The university of Rome was supposed to be frequented by the children of the city’s middle class, who would study, not only close to the Medici family’s palace, but inside a very lavish palazzo. This aspect arguably made the Sapienza instrumental in completing the Pope’s vision of the translatio imperii, not only as a way for creating consensus, but also for including education as a means towards this purpose.

Della Porta’s project can thus be read as the physicalization of Giuliano da Sangallo’s previous diagrammatic plan for Siena. Between the two projects, the compositional principles and layout are more or less the same but carry fundamental ideological differences. Della Porta’s typological solution corresponds to the representational and rhetorical value that university college buildings had to express in the context of humanism and the following counterreformation period. From this moment, palazzi, sapienzas and colleges had to be built keeping in mind the new universal power assumed by the Church in Rome. These new political priorities gradually replaced the social mission of charitable colleges, activating a first step towards the fragmentation of the university’s welfare, which, not by chance, was reflected in the Sapienza by the removal of students’ lodgings.

COURTYARDS & CORRIDORS: STUDYING WITH THE JESUITS

The idea of education as an exclusionary milieu was one of the most controversial aspects of Italian humanist culture and papal Rome. This aspect of education was polemically addressed by Martin Luther and Protestantism which spread in central and northern Europe throughout the sixteenth century. Papal Rome was very concerned about the fast diffusion of reformatory movements, pushing the Church to institute the officialization of a series of new orders whose role was to face the protestant problem and relaunch the original values of Christianity. The Company of Jesus, founded in 1540 by Spanish father Ignatius of Loyola, was one such religious order. Immediately, the Jesuits decided to include teaching and college foundation as a main goal of their program. At that time, this program was the only possible way for transmitting Christian values against the reformatory threat, within an agenda that included a return to the origins of medieval universities. To a certain extent, the Jesuits were revisiting the influence of scholasticism in teaching and that of the medieval collegium. This was also the most successful move by the Company of Jesus who was rigorous and strategic in devising an innovative pedagogical project, formulated in the 1599 teaching manual Ratio Studiorum, based on Loyola’s doctrine of the Spiritual Exercises.

The Ratio was the text drafted by the fathers of the order which regulated the programs of their schools and the collective life of their colleges. The text’s main purpose was related to the Exercises, a series of practices including a very disciplined time commitment of repetitions and concentrations in learning and teaching. In every foundation the Ratio remained constant while building forms and types varied, adapting to the particular political, cultural and urban context. This result was part of a strategy put forward by the Company in two ways: first by building a network of colleges concentrated in Rome, and second by establishing new colleges in areas where Protestantism was already influential, like in Germany and northern Europe.

The central decision-making process, the application of the same rule and the hierarchical and sectorial organization of teaching were manifested in the typological innovations put forward by their colleges. The Collegio Romano, designed by Giuseppe Valeriano, became the model on which future foundations were established. The final configuration of the college synthetizes some of the main characteristics and typological innovations brought by the Jesuits:

1. Their college buildings were opened both to boarding students and to external scholars, corresponding with the spatial importance given to the main public courtyard.

2. The Jesuits were the first to introduce the separation and classification of students in classrooms, an aspect that was partially reflected in the use of a distributive combination between classrooms and corridors, a possible precursor of the modern school.

3. From the sixteenth century, college life was subjected to the reformatory work of many educators, including the Jesuits who introduced a very strict control on both social life and schedules, as well as a very efficient administration, aspects that were paralleled by the persistence of the individual cells. Nevertheless, students spent the majority of their time in communal activities like in classrooms, libraries and study rooms in the city, which were fundamental places for their concentration in a chaotic city like sixteenth century Rome.

Immediately, the architecture of Jesuit colleges absorbed the archetype of the palazzo/sapienza by pushing it to the extreme, towards a situation in which this type could become another type. Like the English examples, the experience of the Studium Urbis, including the Sapienza, and the network of the different Jesuit colleges, gave form to an urban scenario—visible in Giovanni Battista Nolli’s famous Grande Pianta di Roma—which can be described as a labyrinthic conglomeration of courtyard types. It is exactly this scenario in which many palazzi and collegi spread across the city, becoming an inspiration for Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s “negative utopia,” the famous Ichnographia Campi Martii engraved two centuries later as re-enactment of Imperial Rome. Both Piranesi’s Campo Marzio and his previous plan for an Ampio Magnifico Collegio, according to Manfredo Tafuri, already announced the start of a “dissolution” which affected the architecture of the city, as well as the architecture of colleges. As Tafuri argued, in the Magnifico Collegio, the proliferation of several concentric spaces and multiple forms inside a huge courtyard seemed to paradoxically corrode and cancel the typological value of the institution. Seen from this perspective, the Campo Marzio was the final expression of this dissolution at the scale of the entire city.

THE JEFFERSONIAN CAMPUS
AND THE (WHITE) MIDDLE-CLASS STUDENT

Unlike Piranesi and their European counterparts, North American settlers used the word campus to refer to something representing the very opposite of the city. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term “campus” assumed an institutional value within the framework of education and university planning in the USA. The work of Thomas Jefferson, particularly his project for the University of Virginia, established a new idea of the campus and of university planning as part of a political program that included the provision of public education as a priority.

During Jefferson’s times, both in Europe and in the USA, college had a very low reputation. The institution’s diminished standing was due to the association of college with religious organizations and military academies and hospitals. Therefore, one of the main issues for figures concerned with public education was how to make colleges attractive again. Such a task was especially challenging considering the traumatic effect of college caused by an adolescent’s abandonment of the family in order to pursue education.

It is possible to argue that the historical passage from college to campus can, in part, give an answer to this question, as the campus, with its pastoral program and idyllic landscape, had to be adapted for the purpose of offering a familiar place to young students on the scale of the entire state. As a result, architectural design became subordinate to the discipline and scale of both landscape design and territorial planning. In order to attract more students, the campus had to offer both a beautiful, peaceful and relaxing environment as well as an educational structure where professors educated students through a strong sense of pastoral care. The need for such social support on campuses was related to the introduction of the loco parentis. This term, which literally means, “in the place of a parent,” can be associated with the way how many of the new campuses were pedagogically structured.

Jefferson’s project for the Virginia Campus can be interpreted as an attempt to make this pastoral turn even more explicit through the “creation” of a new type, conventionally called an “academical village”. In 1817, he proposed a schematic drawing consisting of a linear C-shaped enclosure, made of individual cells and punctuated by a repetition of villas. Despite the project’s territorial scale, its composition was very domestic: each villa was the venue of a different faculty; it had a hall on the ground level to host lectures and student meetings and on the upper floor was an apartment for the professor and his family. Interpreting Palladian compositions, the villa of each professor was flanked by the individual cells of his students. Mixing a domestic environment with one of teaching was not new for Jefferson who recounted that some of his most useful experiences as a student occurred while sitting around a dining table with his professors.

Another decisive aspect of Jefferson’s scheme was its ability to grow or shrink in scale. The Virginia plan could be expanded almost infinitely by following the same compositional logic. This moment marked the definitive separation between type and morphology in campus planning: new buildings in American campuses very seldom followed the logic of the original settlement. From the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, new campus buildings only shared land, property and vegetation with the existing settlement. In fact, it was almost intentional for campus planners to build campuses with very unclear limits and boundaries, limited at least on the use of ephemeral vegetal elements, like trees and brushes, that could eventually be destroyed when further expansions were needed.

Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, higher education had assumed a very important position as both a public and private institution. In parallel with state investments, the private sector, through donors and entrepreneurial founders, was starting to pave the way for the corporate university. Replacing Jefferson’s welfare structure, which advocated for public schools, the US Federal Government was gradually contributing to a more systematic dissolution of the college and the campus itself. The most direct evidence of future education reforms coincided with a gradual exclusion and separation of student and professors’ dwellings, from teaching and administration activities.

Alexander Jackson Davis put forward a similar approach in 1856 with his project for Davidson College, in North Carolina. Unlike the Virginia campus, Davis’s proposal focused on a sense of community. His large courtyard was designed as a modern student housing with a central double-loaded corridor, a central chapel and the classrooms placed on the corners of the quadrangle. The main Jeffersonian reference of the project was the positioning of isolated villas meant for the professors, that this time were spread in the fields that were part of the campus, far from the main quadrangle, underscoring its idyllic setting.

Twenty years later, the same logic was pushed further by Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for Stanford University in Palo Alto. The project was initiated by one of the most important businessmen of the time, Leland Stanford. Stanford earned his fortune in the development of railroads, and in the early 1880s, wanted to found a university in the memory of his prematurely departed son. The new foundation, besides its educational purposes, was a pragmatic choice. The increasing price of urbanized land in San Francisco made investing in the non-urban campus planning a more attractive option by the end of the nineteenth century. A fact that is underscored by the project’s commission going to a very important landscape architect. Moreover, the campus now became part of a project whose main design goals were subordinated to the need to control and regulate land use, rather than to experiment with any typological research on the accommodation of students or to invent new teaching ideologies.

Olmsted’s project was indeed very realistic: he concentrated the main administrative and teaching activities on a linear strip of multiple quadrangles, that could be multiplied, as in Jefferson’s idea, depending on the future needs of the institution. Olmsted ultimately detached all residential spaces from the quadrangles, replacing them with a suburban grid. Instead of being integrated within the college, dwellings were designed as a system of villas with gardens, outside the quadrangles, in separated residential areas for students, professors and non-members of the college.

THE COURTYARD LEAVES THE CAMPUS

While the Jeffersonian campus addressed the crisis of the institution of education denounced by Piranesi in the eighteenth century, its legacy became very problematic. Once the typological and institutional dissolution from college to campus was finally achieved with Jefferson and his villas, a stable background was fixed for a further disintegration of the courtyard as a type. The development of the campus during the nineteenth century was paralleled, on the one hand, by a gradual dismantling of the welfare of the university and, on the other, by new typological inventions, whose aim was to introduce and regulate sex and class differences. Not only did this correspond to the separation of students’ rooms from classrooms, setting professors socially apart from students, but it also introduced new typological problems for architects.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, linear residential typologies were replacing courtyards, giving rise to the modern dormitories. Through this final passage, corridors were massively introduced in linear buildings, in particular when female students entered university campuses. This was especially true in the case of women’s colleges, where the corridor was used to have a better control over their social life. On the other hand, isolated dormitory buildings were increasingly being designed as “hotel-like,” precisely to highlight the temporary nature of students in mass universities. Such became a domestic reminder of how student life was intended as a very precarious moment, the same condition of precariousness that would find them right after graduation as young workers.

Given the above, it is understandable why European students were rejecting the campus when it was imported in Europe. Their revolts in the 1960s and late 1970s in Paris, Rome, Lausanne and Zurich protesting against the fact that many municipalities decided to externalize universities by building “American campuses”, were not only right in raising a critique towards the university structured as a factory, but especially because of the way through which they predicted how fragile and unstable a campus—as a unbounded and open field—could be if its surroundings are subjected to the daily pressure of land speculators. This was clear since the late 1970s with the development of so-called office parks in Europe and even more today in cities like Lausanne, Milan and Zurich, where the “campus,” totally soaked within the ideology of “green” and “sustainability,” is being used as the new mantra for legitimizing the development of luxury housing and for speculating outside the city.

AUTHOR

Marson Korbi is an architect and postdoctoral researcher of TPOD Lab. at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His research focuses on the field of history and theory of architecture, with a particular interest on domestic space, urbanism, and politics. He is currently working on a publication on the history of student housing.