The Campus: Architecture's Show Place

IN 18th century America, the best architecture generally was done for church and government. In the 19th century, the U.S.'s energetic new merchants demanded and got structures that achieved power through honesty. For the first half of this century, the office builder tended to get the great result. Now the U.S.'s colleges and universities clearly have become architecture's prime patrons.

The educators had almost no choice. Faced with the problem of educating the children produced in the post-World War II "baby boom," nearly every college has sought--often desperately--to expand its facilities. Since 1960 the University of California has added three entirely new campuses and 77 major buildings on its six older campuses to cope with an increase in enrollment of 58,000. The State University of New York, which in 1962 had small and relatively unknown campuses scattered around the state, has almost tripled in size to serve its present 195,000 students.

Such a tremendous amount of necessary new construction was obviously an opportunity for architects. For one thing, they were released from the relentless cost-per-square-foot imperatives of rental space that now make an egg-crate desolation of most city buildings.

For another, the colleges, as custodians of culture, accept what amounts to a moral obligation to recognize and foster quality in their buildings. Says Bernard P. Spring, dean of the architectural school at City College of New York: "We have so much good architecture at universities for the same reason that we have so much unrest there. The college is the most open institution around nowadays--open to ideas, to innovation, to change."

After You, Please. The most advanced designs for theaters and research labs, not to mention libraries, have found their first expression in university buildings. Long spans, hyperbolic paraboloid roofs, computerized designs and other advanced structural techniques often are used with unabashed gusto.

Stylistically, the colleges seem to favor fortress-like buildings. Whether made of humble brick, crisp steel or powerfully molded concrete, the structures somehow look ready for any attack. A case in point is the rust-colored, 13-story agronomy tower designed by Ulrich Franzen for the State University of New York at Cornell. It not only looks eminently easy to defend but also is assertive in its own right. With good reason. The agricultural college, long treated as a stepchild by Cornell, needed to get back into view. While marking the ag college with the tower, however, Franzen respectfully designed and sited the $6,500,000 structure to defer to, rather than overwhelm its neighbors. "It is," he says, "like someone who says, 'After you,' in an elevator."

Vertical lines and a virtual absence of windows give the crisply detailed tower a powerful, brooding air. But the building clearly states its purpose. Devoted to research labs, it is the place where agronomists conduct prolonged experiments in biology and biochemistry, which require precise climate control as well as immunity from such outside contaminants as sunlight. At first the scientists objected to the idea of working in windowless labs, Franzen recalls, "but when we checked into the labs in which they were working, we found that most of them had covered up the windows with cardboard." From the scientists' point of view, the best things about the building are the ingenious way in which Franzen supplies every lab with utilities and the ease with which any lab can be converted to another use.

Another project for the State University of New York, this time for the Fredonia campus near Lake Erie, makes a totally different kind of impression Designed by I.M. Pei & Partners, the strikingly handsome new buildings--smooth concrete structures of unusual shapes--seem refined almost to the point of classicism. Yet the buildings form only part of the architect's real achievement--the reorganization, expansion and enlivening of a dreary college of 1,500 students. Even the site was challenging. Fredonia sprawled over a bleak landscape devoid of trees, natural features or lasting interest.

The solution was planning, a specialty of the Pei office. Henry Cobb, partner in charge, started by creating a visual frame. He designed a poplar-lined road that traces an almost complete circle from a cluster of old buildings to the outermost playing fields and back again. Then he intercepted the circle with five new academic buildings (a student center, lecture hall, library, administration building and arts center) set along an angular pedestrian "spine." These new buildings gave personality and vigor to the college and landscape, thus resolving Fredonia's great problem of formless anonymity. Moreover, they never turn their backs on their older neighbors; rather the new honor and upgrade the old. It is an architecture of good manners--and should set the tone for future buildings at Fredonia.

Nascent Megastructure. Two other large projects reflect the problems and promise of starting a campus from scratch. The 14,000-student campus for Rochester Institute of Technology was designed by five different architectural firms with mixed .results. At one end of the scale, some of the buildings look like neo-Dickensian piles of brick. But the campus is saved from mediocrity by Architects Kevin Roche & John Dinkeloo. Charged with the design of five buildings, including a student union and facilities for physical education, they began by recognizing the harsh climate. In Rochester in winter, it is cold outside. What might have been two distinct buildings for the student union and physical ed were joined to form a single, continuous warm space that stretches 705 ft. from end to end--a nascent megastructure. Inside, the building is almost column-free and airy, thanks to a system of long, glass-clad trusses on the roof. Outside, one wall of the building gives shape and style to the pedestrian walk, malting it an axis for the campus. The students pay the building a high compliment; they use it, so to speak, continuously.

"The idea of the Edwardsville campus of Southern Illinois University," says Architect Gyo Obata, "was to design a university that would allow for change." It was a huge job, starting with a master plan for the 2,600-acre campus and continuing to the design of all the buildings. The plan sensibly separates automobile and pedestrian traffic (though many car-oriented students grumble about the extra walking it dictates) and leaves a lot of land in its natural state. The buildings themselves bluntly express a solution to a difficult problem. Dark brick towers mark parts of the buildings that cannot change --stairways, elevator shafts, mechanical rooms. The concrete-and-glass areas of the buildings, on the other hand, are easily adapted to one use or another.

Proper Symbol. New colleges, of course, can immediately design a key building to organize the whole campus visually. Older colleges, often lacking such a centerpiece, have filled this need in various ways. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the "brutal," concrete Campus Center building by Architects Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard achieves dominance by its height, heft and obvious muscle. At Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the central symbol is a breathtaking piece of useful sculpture--a great brick ark of a chapel designed by Paul Rudolph (with Fry & Welch). Within, an enormous warped ceiling and asymmetrical walls bathed in natural light help to give, says Rudolph, "an air of the inexplicable." From the outside, it is a joyous shout of a building, as abstract and complex as religion and worth a pilgrimage.

In many universities, the most important building is often a library. The Goddard Library at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and the Central Library for the University of California at San Diego were both designed as such centerpieces. Both have an open lower level as an invitation to students to use the facilities. Both express their basic organizational concept clearly and directly. And there the similarities end.

Well-Thumbed Pile. The $4,200,000 Goddard is an exuberant building, containing as much life and personality as all its books combined. Architect John Johansen explains the building casually: "I had an organizing idea, and then I rigged the building around it." More specifically, Johansen wanted to make the library a gigantic "box of books" surrounded by other functions--study stations, lounges, music-listening and microfilm rooms. While the resulting building is eccentric, its jumble of protrusions, shafts, recesses, towers, apertures, and entrances looks oddly correct, as if a library should look like a pile of well-thumbed books.

San Diego's Central Library had a more rigorously logical starting point. It is, in effect, a three-dimensional plan of how a student might best be served by a library. After considerable study, Architects William Pereira & Associates chose an arrangement in which a student on the widest horizontal floor is never more than two minutes away from any other part of the library. Then, to fulfill the requirement that the library be the dominant element of the campus, this scheme, expressed in a glassy spherical section of the building, was hoisted melodramatically 30 ft. above a podium on massive concrete piers.

E for Effort. The buildings that colleges are now producing do more than smite the eye. They also appeal to the intellect. But how well do they serve their users? The answer comes only with time. In the past, bold buildings by renowned designers have opened on college campuses to resounding applause from other architects--and then have earned the dislike of students and faculty.

In 1963, Architect Paul Rudolph packed 36 levels into his seven-story Art and Architecture Building at Yale. It was a stunning display of spatial organization and strikingly handsome. But students soon gave it an E for effort --which is a failing grade. They complained of faulty air conditioning, inadequate room for their work and poor lighting. Before the building was gutted by fire last year, its windows were filthy. They had, in fact, seldom been washed: the architect had neglected to provide any simple, economical way for washers to get to the great glass panes.

Bold Future. The Architecture and Art Building on the University of Illinois' stunning Circle Campus in Chicago also stumbled, in effect, over its untied shoelaces. Although Walter Netsch, a brilliant partner at Skidmore. Owings & Merrill, intended to develop an especially efficient organizational layout, he ended up with a devilishly intricate maze. In certain parts of the building, going to the bathroom entails a walk up one flight of stairs and down another.

But such failures are magnificent ones, architectural experiments that excite bold clients. Although the pace of campus building has slackened because of tight money, the colleges show no signs of canceling their huge construction programs--or their innovative plans. Architects now talk confidently of building with mass-produced, clip-together parts and of the speedy evolution of megastructures that stretch literally for miles. They anticipate denser, more crowded campuses, hence are stressing the fine points of siting their buildings to make the most of an ever decreasing amount of open space. The colleges, in other words, are exploring and perhaps determining the future direction of American architecture.

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