Future Campus

Ian Taylor, Ian Taylor

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000701586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

This book is to help architects, design teams and University clients (estates departments, and academics) in their pursuit of practical and innovative solutions for the creation of enabling higher education learning environments. It includes abundant examples of solutions to design problems and advice on best practice.

This book argues that investment in the higher education sector is a driver for intellectual, social and economic development, offering opportunities for positive impacts for the physical environment on the character and performance of higher education.

The editor believes that good outcomes result from good design, which should address elements such as learning from best current practice, the importance of clear briefing, good environmental performance, the positive social impacts and, also, the importance of ensuring a beautiful outcome.

It has chapters contributed from leading-edge practices, including case studies with highly illustrated project examples. All this is underpinned by an understanding of the practicalities of working in the sector as well as the socio-political and economic context and trends shaping future practice.

1
context and masterplanning

The framework that guides the development of a university estate should primarily reflect the ambitions and character of the institution, building on the opportunities of its context and enhancing the specialisms which it offers.

Funding challenges and the opportunities that the internet offers tertiary education are two major factors changing the requirements of the physical estate. The student experience, and the quality of teaching and research, impact on reputation. The strength of the people and the place will still determine where academics and students choose in a world where everything is more closely connected by electronic communication.

Universities need to establish priorities for investment, and building designers need to understand the context in which new spaces need to operate.

Tom Kvan’s observations on the current context facing university development raise questions about the timescales for masterplanning and suggest that additional or alternative strategies are required to address the fast rate of change.

Guidance on issues to be addressed, and how a strategic framework might be manifested are set out in the masterplanning section by Philip E. Ogden and Rupert Cook.

1.1 Context

Tom Kvan

Opinion

Driven by budgetary uncertainties and marching to managerial timelines, we easily forget the context within which campus developments take place. We start then by reminding ourselves that there are two purposes that guide and inform our thinking about university campuses:

1. the overarching academic purpose or vision of the institution
2. an attitude to the academic community that uses the campus.

Campuses take many forms, from the urban assemblage of extant buildings to custom-built compositions on greenfield sites. In considering ‘campus planning’, it is helpful to recognise that we can identify two distinct conditions with different demands:

1. there are those large bounded campus territories that can be regulated by the university, or
2. there are campuses composed of discrete buildings located in an urban fabric controlled by other agencies.

Most often, the term ‘campus planning’ refers to the former, as the term came to be used in the early to mid-20th century as nations and communities invested heavily in expanding the tertiary sector and allocated large tracts of land to such purposes.

Universities also vary widely in scale. Some campuses are large communities of users – often with many tens of thousands of people present each working day, campuses can be the size of small towns. Likewise, their operating budgets would place them as significant stock-traded businesses and the commensurate capital investments are significant. Regardless of size, campus development is a matter of technical consideration as well as social, with the facilitation and nurturing of an academic community. For example, Thomas Jefferson expressed this explicitly in 1819 when he sought to bring sense and order to the University of Virginia by conceptualising it as an ‘academical village’.¹ The University of São Paulo recognises this with the election of a mayor (prefeita) for their campus² who is a voice for the considerable population of users.

Today, this population is highly mobile. Students and staff flow around their countries, regions and the world, choosing their place of study by comparing attributes and experience. Universities are under pressure to distinguish themselves: to differentiate their offerings to students and their experience, to ensure better graduate opportunities and to be good employers. The delivery of buildings and creating a future campus is a risky and expensive activity. Of course we need careful planning, proper risk management and strong project control. The problems arise when those aspects of delivering a future campus take over. With risk comes opportunity; a project in which risk is fully managed-out is often so sterilised that the product is anodyne.

Campus Planning, Historic Perspective

While universities and institutions of higher learning have very extensive histories, we can identify in the 19th century the emergence of our modern understanding that distinguishes between two discrete models. One model was articulated by John Henry Newman³ as having a singular focus on teaching, drawing on ‘universal knowledge’ in an ecclesiastic and monastic tradition. The other model is that of a purpose-formed research institution, as exemplified by Humboldt’s framing of the pursuit of knowledge through personal discovery.⁴ This distinction can be observed not only in academic agendas and institutional visions but also in the practices of campus planning. In different nations, these two images take different priorities: in Britain, it is the Newman model that has been the popular image of a university with the associated typology of a cloistered quad; while the typology for the Humboldt model is the research bunker, the building camouflaging the activity within, rendering it anonymous.

As higher education expanded in the third quarter of the 20th century, institutions were mandated to develop with particular missions as framed by these two models. Thus, campuses were planned with a clarity of purpose and supported by a funding scheme that was stable (at least at the beginning). Campus development was undertaken with focus and intent at a time when urban or town planning had emerged with confidence as a management technique that served government and industry well, building from the post-war practices of managerial planning and industrial delivery. It was in this context that the ‘masterplan’ came to be the tool to guide the many steps needed to deliver the academic campus.

Framed in this model of practice, Dober wrote that campus planning was ‘the premeditated guidance of the amount, quality and location of facilities for higher education so as to achieve a predetermined objective. The objective is the plan.’⁵ Academic infrastructure was then delivered against this plan. Buildings were identified for their particular purpose in serving an aspect of academic activity. The masterplan controlled each step along the way.

To support the scale of design and delivery of these campuses, a number of mid-century professional journals published regular articles documenting practice and advising on approaches. One broadly referenced body of this work is that by Mildred F. Schmertz published in Architectural Record, compiled into the text ‘Campus planning and design’.⁶ In this, each building is an object on campus described by type and function, each built according to the masterplan, although she notes that ‘A building or building group which is conceived as part of an overall design for campus function and growth tends to serve purposes beyond the mere provision of necessary facilities.’ Here she recognises that the plan, once executed, is subverted by users and consideration given to these other uses.

The Academic Mission Today

In the Newman model, the university was conceived with the monastic court as the genus, isolated from the chaos of daily life. Exiting the academic quad meant stepping into the secular disorder of the civic realm, the contrast underlining the division of the two worlds. Each component of the university, likewise, is of its own world; as buildings were constructed, the inward mission was given priority and value judged by the delivery of that mission. With this framing, campuses were created as bounded and isolated territories and buildings on those campuses were impenetrable.

The globalisation of education has encouraged universities to shift towards a shared – rather than divided – understanding of the continuum of teaching and research. Whether universities engage in more or less of the two components, both play a role and the interaction between the two is increasingly important.

As education access has expanded and higher education is no longer accessible only to a privileged few, society’s expectations of a university have changed. Whether funded by private or public means, universities are playing more proactive roles in their immediate contexts while delivering on their broader missions.

Universities recognise that their campus is the place where it can engage with their communities and thus deliver on a broader and more public mission. In 2006, the University of Pennsylvania adopted a strategy formulated two years earlier, the Penn Compact, to focus the university on addressing major and complex global challenges, but it also explicitly articulated the responsibility the university has to its local community in doing so. This strategic vision was translated into a campus development strategy, ‘Penn Connects’,⁷ to align the university development initiatives with the needs of the immediate community as well as the city of Philadelphia.

The strategy recognised that decisions on land use, building design or academic delivery has social, employment and physical consequences for the urban context of the university. Through this, Pennsylvania has created community benefits from underused land and has added impetus to the city’s sustainability outcomes while also opening academic engagement. This illustrates how, together with its web presence, the campus has become an important contribution to the public face of a university as it engages with different sectors of the wider community.

At the same time, certainty in university funding has been eroded in many countries, including the UK, and capital investments are increasingly challenging to budgets. As the academic sector becomes increasingly closely managed, many universities now require extensive business cases to be prepared to support proposed campus or academic developments. Commensurate with this is a greater focus on short-term returns that challenge the traditional time horizons of academia.

The Learning Experience

A major campus-user community is the student body; for many institutions, students are the primary users and significant sectors of campuses are typically dedicated to them.

Students’ needs are often focused on safety, connectivity and ‘accommodating activities’. The students’ perspective is often captured (and dismissed) in the phrase that the campus is a ‘suitable setting for world class research and teaching’.⁸ Learning is portrayed as being achieved through planned and delivered teaching activities, rather than something experienced and developed.

What role does a campus and its buildings play in learning? This is something we have been researching in our work at the University of Melbourne in our Learning Environments applied Research Network (LEaRN). Here we have looked at the learning outcomes for primary, secondary and tertiary students and the places in which they learn.⁹ The work considers both formal and informal spaces. For example, we have followed medical students as they learn in corridors while taking part in ward rounds, thus informing how we might better design corridors as essential learning places.

It is clear that tertiary environments contribute in several ways. At all levels, learning progresses through the encounter with, and testing of, ideas. While there are often well-publicised exceptions, the vast majority benefit from learning with others. Likewise, those who teach benefit from structured engagement and support to deliver their teaching, not least from periodic contact with students. As Glyn Davis says, ‘Group discussion reminds us that knowledge is always an argument about evidence – we need to hear a range of viewpoints, including those we will not accept.’¹⁰

The campus experience also plays a role in cohort progression from adolescence to adulthood. All societies and cultures develop mechanisms to guide and develop young people; campuses are a contemporary space in which such development occurs.

The physical environment in which the learning takes place is more t...