Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to AD, this time breaking down four of the most common styles of college campus. Universities have been around for almost a thousand years and in that time have seen their designs evolve through the generations. From the collegiate gothic halls of Yale to modern and brutalist buildings later added to the campuses of Harvard and UPenn, Wyetzner takes an in depth look at some of the most famous styles of college architecture to look out for this semester.
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00:00People often say that college is the best four years of your life,
00:03but it was also likely that it was some of the best architecture you've been around as well.
00:06I'm Michael Weitzner, and I've been an architect for over 35 years.
00:09And today we're going to look at the five most common styles of university architecture.
00:13So what is it about university architecture that gives you a feeling you can only get on campus?
00:21There are some things that nearly all college campuses have in common.
00:25For one thing, they all work like a self-contained city.
00:27And that's because nearly all of them share a common design starting point.
00:31The quadrangle, or as it's known today, the quad.
00:34For centuries, learning was largely the monopoly of the religious orders.
00:38And architecturally, this manifested itself in the cloisters and monasteries of monks.
00:44These monasteries were self-contained groups of buildings,
00:47typically connected to a cathedral, and also providing housing, study chambers, and dining halls.
00:52And all of these buildings were connected around an interior courtyard
00:55known as a cloister or a garth.
00:58This later became the model for today's college quadrangle or quad.
01:02Two of the earliest universities founded in the Western world used these cloisters as a model.
01:06So Oxford was founded nearly a thousand years ago in 1096.
01:10And Cambridge followed just a hundred years later in 1209.
01:14In fact, Jesus College at Cambridge started off as a monastery.
01:18But even though almost all universities share these elements,
01:21campus architecture comes in a wide variety of styles.
01:24So let's take a look at some of the most common styles of collegiate architecture in the U.S.
01:29First up, the colonial style.
01:31The first university founded in the United States was Harvard in 1636,
01:36which means it wasn't even the United States yet. It was still Britain.
01:39In fact, Cornell was the only Ivy League school built after the Declaration of Independence.
01:44So it makes sense that all these universities were built in the British style of the time,
01:47which was Georgian, named after the King's George.
01:50And speaking of the Declaration of Independence,
01:52the author of that great document was Thomas Jefferson,
01:55who was also the founder and architect of the University of Virginia.
02:00Thomas Jefferson was a great and flawed and complicated human being.
02:05He was a lawyer. He was a scientist, a philosopher, a writer, a revolutionary,
02:11an ambassador, a governor, a secretary of state, a vice president, and a president.
02:17And he was also a slave owner.
02:18Although he wrote the Declaration of Independence,
02:20he never lived up to its strong words about equality and freedom.
02:24Despite his well-documented moral failings,
02:27he was also indisputably one of the greatest architects of the colonial era.
02:32So let's take a look at Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia.
02:35So this was built in 1819. So here's everything that jumps out at me.
02:39Jefferson designed it in this quasi-Georgian style,
02:43but it's really more Palladian, referring to the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio.
02:48And Palladio based his architecture on classical Greek and Roman architecture.
02:53Straight away is the Rotunda, which is obviously based on the Pantheon in Rome,
02:58with its dome and its columns impediment over the entrance.
03:03The other thing Jefferson did was he built what he called an academical village,
03:08and he built it around this stepped courtyard.
03:12And you could see this courtyard stepping up.
03:14And in the other direction, he opened it up to the view of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
03:19Later, that view was blocked by a building by McKim, Mead & White,
03:23which is really one of the most regretful architectural mistakes.
03:27These buildings were made from red brick.
03:29In fact, the columns, which appear to be stone,
03:32are actually built from brick as well, plastered over, and then painted.
03:36And many buildings in colonial America were built from red brick.
03:39In fact, in Britain at the time, the term red brick university was used to describe newer schools
03:44that came after the venerated Oxford and Cambridge.
03:47So let's take a look at the plan of the university.
03:50So what we just saw in that previous photograph was that Pantheon-like building
03:55called the Rotunda right here, which is the library.
03:57And then there were those arcaded wings that were built around this stepped lawn in the center.
04:03And then he built two outer wings on either side called the Hotels, where people lived.
04:09In fact, Edgar Allan Poe lived there when he attended the university.
04:13And between these wings and the hotel wings was called the Range,
04:18which was just filled with these gardens.
04:20And within that range created his famous undulating brick walls.
04:24The other thing that Jefferson does, which is so interesting,
04:27is he creates these pavilions to interrupt the long arcade.
04:31And each pavilion references a building from the Roman Forum.
04:36Jefferson had help with the design of the university from Benjamin Latrobe and Dr. William Thornton.
04:41In fact, Benjamin Latrobe is considered the first professional architect in the United States.
04:45But ironically, after the U.S. declared independence, newer schools wanted to look older.
04:51So let's take a look at the next wave of university styles in the U.S.
04:55Collegiate Gothic.
04:57The Collegiate Gothic style is probably one of the most familiar to the over 170 million Americans who hold a college degree.
05:03There are countless examples of university buildings from every decade built in this style,
05:07including Duke University Chapel, Washington University in St. Louis,
05:11City College in New York City, the University of Chicago,
05:14and the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh,
05:17which is actually the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere.
05:21As recently as 2017, Yale built yet another building in the Collegiate Gothic style.
05:25But although these buildings wanted to make themselves appear older and more prestigious,
05:30many of them didn't even use a lot of the Gothic elements,
05:34other than making themselves out of masonry and stone.
05:38So typically what became the Collegiate Gothic style were buildings that were built out of masonry,
05:42brick, locally sourced stone, whose openings were trimmed with limestone
05:47and had limestone ornament at the roof and other places on the building.
05:52And really the first Collegiate Gothic building in the United States was the building known as Old Kenyon,
05:57the residence hall at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1824.
06:01Okay, so here's everything that jumps out at me.
06:03The pieces that employ Gothic architecture really only include the series of windows
06:09at the uppermost floor that use the pointed Gothic arch,
06:13these spires that you see on all the corners and at the top of the gable,
06:18and this main spire that you would also see on a church.
06:22It's also built out of stone, which nearly all Gothic architecture was built out of.
06:26And these windows at the top that use the pointed Gothic arch
06:30and also use the Gothic tracery in the uppermost sash of the window.
06:35The parts of the building that are not Gothic are much more abundant.
06:39Most of the windows actually are not Gothic at all.
06:41In fact, they just have a traviated opening using a flat lintel.
06:45They also have these very pronounced dormers along the roof line,
06:50and they also have these crenelated chimneys.
06:52Crenelations became part of the Collegiate Gothic language,
06:57but were never really part of Gothic architecture.
06:59They're more medieval.
07:00They created these slots for soldiers to use bows and arrows against their enemies.
07:04So this is an example of a building that uses sort of a sprinkling of Gothic elements,
07:08but it's a far cry from a true Collegiate Gothic building.
07:11So let's take a look at a building that was built almost 100 years later
07:14that's far more faithful to the Gothic style.
07:17In fact, it looks like it could be the bell tower of a Gothic church in Germany or France.
07:22Well, first off, it's made out of stone.
07:24Secondly, it has these buttresses that hold up the building,
07:28which was traditional in all Gothic architecture.
07:31It has these statues, which were also used to ornament Gothic churches.
07:37It has the pointed arch windows with the fine tracery stonework between them.
07:42And you can even see the gargoyles sticking out almost at the top.
07:46So this really looks like an old-fashioned Gothic tower.
07:51In fact, there was a legend at the campus that they used acid to wash the stone
07:56to make it look even older, when in fact, most people believe they just used dirty construction water.
08:01So if you compare these two buildings,
08:02you can really see the great range of Collegiate Gothic style on campuses.
08:07But not every college wants to look like a piece of history.
08:10So let's take a look at the next major style to take campuses by storm.
08:13Modernism.
08:14Let's talk about the Illinois Institute of Technology,
08:17a new campus designed from scratch in the 1940s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
08:22Mies had run the Bauhaus in Germany after Walter Gropius and Hans Meyer from 1930 to 1933,
08:29until it was shut down by the Nazis, who viewed its curriculum as degenerate and un-German.
08:34At that point, Mies fled to the United States,
08:37where he was courted by the Illinois Institute of Technology.
08:40Not since Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia in 1819
08:44had an American campus been the work of a single architect.
08:47Instead of designing the buildings around a central open space or quad,
08:50he embraced the idea of the Chicago street grid and created two separate groupings of buildings,
08:55one north of 33rd Street and one south.
08:58Okay, so this is a typical building on the IIT campus.
09:01And you can see they're all two to three stories tall.
09:04They employ brick and glass.
09:06He uses a 24 by 24 foot module that you can see here.
09:11And you can see how the steel is expressed, so you know how the building is constructed.
09:16They all have flat roofs.
09:17And this style of architecture was so influential,
09:20nearly every high school in the United States that was built in the 50s and 60s looks almost exactly like this.
09:27You can see it's completely stripped of ornament.
09:30It's very rational, which was a hallmark of architectural modernism.
09:34For 16 years, between 1929 and 1945,
09:37basically no new ground was broken on new buildings in the U.S. and Europe
09:41because of the war and the depression before it.
09:44And when building resumed, design and public appreciation of architectural aesthetics
09:48jumped from imitating antiquity to cutting edge modernism.
09:52Campuses were no longer interested in looking old.
09:54It was a new world and time to embrace the future.
09:57And to some, the old world became associated with the atrocities of the war.
10:01And so many schools started to build more and more modernist buildings.
10:04Early modernism was political as well as aesthetic and associated with utopianism.
10:10It endeavored to create a clean, healthy, egalitarian new world.
10:13But that idea was wrecked by the realities of World War II.
10:16So modernism now was no longer about this sort of utopian world.
10:21And modernism just became another style.
10:24It was about rationalism, functionality, and hygiene.
10:29In fact, many of these buildings were criticized for looking all the same and looking like factories.
10:33So let's talk about the most famous building on the campus, which really stands out.
10:36And that's the architecture school called Crown Hall.
10:39Crown Hall is one of the most famous modern buildings in the world.
10:42And it was completed in 1956.
10:44And what's different about this building is that it's made out of glass.
10:48But the most distinctive thing he did at Crown Hall
10:50was he put the beams that support the roof on top of the roof.
10:55So the interior has absolutely no columns.
10:58And when you walk in, it is this one soaring plane of a ceiling,
11:03which creates this really exhilarating effect.
11:06Mies is famous for sort of breaking open the box.
11:09So before, to create space or a room, typically architects used four walls.
11:14You entered in, and you were in a room.
11:16But Mies did something different.
11:18He broke those walls apart, and he just used planes.
11:22So to create space, he put a wall here, and then he put a wall here,
11:26and then he put another wall here, like he did at the Barcelona Pavilion.
11:30And all of a sudden, you've created a whole new way of spacemaking.
11:34And he was the son of a stonemason.
11:36And so quite often, he employed these beautiful materials,
11:39some of them stone, some of them exotic woods.
11:42And he created these beautiful, meandering spaces
11:46defined by these beautiful planes.
11:49Next up, Brutalism, the Richards Medical Laboratory
11:53at the University of Pennsylvania,
11:55a building that paved the way for the plethora of Brutalist buildings
12:00on campuses across America.
12:02So this building was completed in 1961
12:04by another giant of late 20th century architecture
12:08by the name of Louis Kahn.
12:10And the thing about Kahn was he was almost like this guru,
12:13and he was an existentialist
12:15who believed in the power and the poetry of architecture,
12:19and that's significant.
12:21He had all these great aphorisms about architecture,
12:23and perhaps his most famous was,
12:25when you ask a brick what it wants to be, it responds,
12:28I like an arch.
12:30The building was completed by 1961, and it's made out of brick.
12:33And he took sort of the precepts of modernism,
12:36response to programmatic need, functionalism,
12:39and an honest expression of materials,
12:41and created a new kind of architecture.
12:43And one of the significant things he did here was
12:45he separated served and servant spaces.
12:48He created places for the technologies
12:51that are required to serve modern buildings.
12:54So exhaust towers and fresh air intakes
12:57and electrical bus duct runs
12:59were all taken outside on the building,
13:02and you could see that in these towers that run on the outside.
13:06And that was actually an idea that he derived from,
13:08believe it or not, Palladio from the 16th century,
13:12where he was looking at Palladio's famous Villa Rotunda
13:15and realized, wow, that central space is actually served
13:19by the spaces around it.
13:21Another thing that really influenced the design of this building
13:23was the Italian hill town of San Gimignano,
13:26which had all these beautiful towers,
13:28of which these towers that he created on the outside of the building
13:32for the exhaust and intake of air are very reminiscent.
13:36This building was so influential
13:38that there was an exhibition devoted entirely
13:41to this one building at the Museum of Modern Art,
13:43where they stated it was probably the single most consequential building
13:46constructed in the United States since World War II.
13:49It certainly became one of the most influential.
13:51Nearly every college campus in the U.S.
13:53has a building that was imitating it.
13:55The other thing this building does
13:57is it sort of opens the door to brutalism,
13:59and by that I mean it's got large expanses
14:02of undifferentiated material.
14:05In this case, it's brick.
14:07But of course, the term brutalist
14:09was coined by another influential architect,
14:11Le Corbusier.
14:13So this is the Carpenter Center at Harvard by Corbusier.
14:16It was completed in 1963.
14:18It's constructed from poured-in-place concrete,
14:21and it's considered an example of brutalism in the United States.
14:24Corbusier sort of coined the term for brutalism
14:27with his poured-in-place concrete housing project in Marseille.
14:31In fact, the term brutalism comes from the term
14:34which means raw concrete in French.
14:37So Corbusier essentially invented this brutalist style,
14:41and it became wildly popular on college campuses.
14:44So these two buildings by Kahn and Corbusier
14:46were hugely influential.
14:48But some of Kahn's later buildings,
14:50where he started to incorporate historical references
14:52more obviously, leads to a whole other style of architecture,
14:56and that's postmodernism.
14:58So the progression into postmodernism
15:00is best exemplified by Robert Venturi
15:03and Denise Scott Brown's Gordon Woo Hall
15:05at Princeton University.
15:07Venturi wrote a book called
15:09Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,
15:11which was a real groundbreaking work in 1966.
15:14One might say it changed the aesthetics of architecture
15:17from minimalism to maximalism.
15:19Postmodernism is sort of a return
15:21to using historical references in architecture.
15:25Some people did it really quite cleverly,
15:28like Venturi and Scott Brown,
15:30and others did it more clumsily,
15:32where it just became sort of
15:34a watered-down version of historical architecture.
15:37So this building was built for Butler College,
15:39and it contains a dining hall,
15:41and it contains some offices,
15:43a lounge, and spaces like that, and a library.
15:45And the idea of it was to unify
15:47the different buildings of Butler College.
15:49And right next door you could just catch a glimpse
15:51of one of the existing collegiate Gothic buildings
15:54that had already existed.
15:56What they did was they created these big bay windows
15:59that relate to that collegiate Gothic building.
16:01These sort of bay windows with the stone dividers between them
16:05is a classic motif of collegiate Gothic architecture.
16:08And then they also throw in this Palladian window,
16:11another reference to Palladio,
16:13at the center above the shed roof,
16:15which is really fun because you don't really see that
16:18in collegiate Gothic architecture.
16:20And then they also have this sort of band
16:22of ornamented brick that terminates,
16:24or is interrupted, I should say,
16:26by this scupper that's circular
16:28and outlined in stone trim as well.
16:31And then above the entrance,
16:33they overlap different images,
16:35and they take these sort of cartoon versions
16:38of historic forms,
16:39some of which can be seen at Kahn's building at DACA,
16:42these triangles and circles, for instance.
16:44One of the funniest things they do in the building,
16:46and most clever thing,
16:48they recess the entry,
16:50and then that entry sort of becomes
16:52this huge expanse of glass along the ground floor.
16:56And that opening is obviously held up
16:59by this very long concealed steel lintel,
17:03which is out of view.
17:04But what they do to be sort of clever and funny
17:06is then they put these sort of cartoon versions
17:08in stone of a keystone
17:10that would normally be the centerpiece of an arch
17:14that would support an opening like this.
17:16But obviously, that arch is not necessary
17:19because of the steel.
17:20So they're sort of making references to history
17:22of how buildings used to be built,
17:24how buildings are currently built,
17:25and they're very clever the way they do it.
17:27So in the same way that Venturi
17:28pulls from all different styles in one building,
17:30today campuses are composed of buildings
17:32in a variety of styles.
17:33Almost every campus has expanded
17:35from the day it was first founded,
17:36and as they grow,
17:37they tend to incorporate more architectural styles
17:40depending on the fashion of the day,
17:42the type of education happening inside,
17:44or even the type of students and donors
17:47they want to attract.
17:48In fact, it is most likely
17:50that any given campus of a certain size
17:52will feature at least one building
17:54in each of these five styles.
17:56Let us know what your favorite collegiate style is
17:58in the comments below.