Architect 2016-01

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A friend who is a partner in a national architectural
firm that does a lot of campus work recounted for me
a conversation he recently had with the university
architect of a leading public institution. That
individual, my friend told me, referred to university
architects as “curators of an architectural petting zoo.”
An exaggeration? Consider the University of
Cincinnati. Over the last decade, the university has
commissioned buildings by Peter Eisenman, FAIA,
Frank Gehry, FAIA, Bernard Tschumi, FAIA, Thom
Mayne, FAIA, and the late Michael Graves. “The hope is
that buildings by starchitects will turn the University of
Cincinnati into a desirable, glamorous place to spend
four years living and studying,” writes Nikil Saval in
a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine. Saval
points out that Cincinnati’s enrollment has increased
and its place in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of
universities rose—slightly—from No. 156 (2011) to No.
129 (2015). (The institution dropped to No. 140 in the
2016 ranking, after the Times article was published.)
Thanks to the architectural glam, what has risen
more than slightly is the university’s debt load, which
is now $1.1 billion. “It’s a financial gamble—one that
many public institutions find themselves driven
to make,” Saval observes. “And it also threatens
something more abstract but no less fundamental: that
the university will turn into a luxury brand, its image
unmoored from its educational mission—a campus that
could be anywhere and nowhere.”
Architectural Constancy
We didn’t always build campuses this way. In 1894,
the University of Pennsylvania, where I used to
teach, appointed Walter Cope and John Stewardson
as campus architects, and over the next two decades
Thayer Academy in Braintree, Mass.
entrusted their local firm with one major building after
another: a dormitory quad, the law school, the school
of engineering, the veterinary school. The exemplary
work—nine buildings in all—continues to define the
architectural character of this urban campus.
Cope & Stewardson worked across the country:
seven buildings at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania,
five at Princeton University in New Jersey, and 11 at
Washington University in St. Louis. Although the firm
more or less invented the style that came to be known
as Collegiate Gothic, its prolonged relationships with
its educational clients ensured that the character of the
built results varied; the Penn quad was Jacobean, while
the main building at Wash U. was, in the architects’
words, “academic Gothic of the fifteenth century.”
Assigning university building to a single firm used
to be a common practice. James Gamble Rogers was
consulting architect at Yale University, and he left a
Gothic Revival stamp on that campus. Ralph Adams
Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue rebuilt the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point in a muscular
Gothic style that Cram described as “between the
Scylla of pictorial romanticism and the Charybdis of
hard utilitarianism.” Cram later served as supervising
architect at Princeton, designed Sweet Briar College
in Virginia (where he switched to Colonial Revival),
and planned a new campus for Rice University in
Houston, whose quadrangles and medieval Byzantine
style have influenced architects to this day. Paul
Philippe Cret adopted a classicized regional style
at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was
supervising architect for four decades and was
responsible for no less than 19 buildings.
Architectural constancy was also visible on private
preparatory school campuses, which often resembled
miniature universities. Cram designed several buildings
at both Choate (in Wallingford, Conn.) and Phillips
Exeter Academy (in New Hampshire). Between 1894 and
1895, George Peabody of the Boston firm Peabody &
Stearns built 10 buildings at the Lawrenceville School in
New Jersey. The Lawrenceville campus was planned by
Frederick Law Olmsted, and two decades later, Olmsted
Brothers laid out the campus for the Middlesex School
in Concord, Mass., where Peabody & Stearns designed
most of the major buildings. While both campuses are
centered on a sort of village green, the buildings at
Lawrenceville are Richardsonian Romanesque, whereas
those at Middlesex are Colonial Revival.
The idea that continuity is more important than
variety persisted until the mid 1900s. Eliel Saarinen
oversaw the development of the Cranbrook schools
for two and a half decades; the result was one of the
most beautiful campuses in the country. Ludwig Mies
warren jagger