The History of Pedestrian Campus Design in North America

3 units

This course will trace the historical forms and uses of universities before the nineteenth century, beginning with those organized around arcaded courtyards. The oldest universities in North America, such as those in Mexico City (founded as Tenochtitlan in 1325), used this model. In the English-speaking colonies of North America, early colleges such as Harvard College (1636) were sited on the edge of town in free-standing masonry buildings set amidst trees. This pattern was further developed by Thomas Jefferson in his design for the University of Virginia (1817-22), which was then widely imitated for the many campuses built thereafter. The seminar will also examine some of the large US campuses which began to be appear after 1880, notably at Stanford University (1885), Columbia University (1896), and Washington University in St. Louis (1898). By the 1930s, modern ideas of campus design arrived with campuses by Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the even more ambitious National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), designed by a team of architects that included Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral (1955). We will also examine some of the many campuses that followed, including buildings on the WashU campus that have offered varied models of pedestrian campus design in light of the social and pedagogical ideas that inspired them.