What Time is this Place?    Kevin Lynch, 1973

Campuses are palimpsests, manuscripts from which previous writing has been scraped to make way for newer writing.   They are physical palimpsests – places from which many prior buildings and landscapes have been removed to make way for subsequent waves of priorities, technologies and design thinking.

Campuses are unfinished stories with pieces written at different times in different languages.  Some have grand chapels, remnants of a time when the language of religion was central to the life of the place.  Most have libraries in prominent locations speaking in the language of collected secular wisdom.  Later, campuses added layers speaking to science and still later recreation centers and athletic stadiums that would erase previous gymnasiums and sports fields.  At the same time students migrated from rooming houses to residence halls.  Through it all, each campus gained a unique founding mythology and visual history of a particular spot on the earth.

Divergent narratives

Campuses, when seen by different writers, produce diverging narratives. Christopher Alexander considered campuses to be organic, growing as new or different needs emerged. Paul Turner saw successive waves of architectural style written in brick, stone and steel. Perry Chapman saw a more experiential nature of campuses as sites of maturity and personal pilgrimage.

Generations of higher education leaders have used campuses as a way of speaking about the importance of their enterprise.  Politicians see campuses as a means of economic development and physical demonstration benefiting constituents.  Facilities managers see them as machines of building space to be maintained and optimized.  Alums fixate on a gauzy memory at the mention of places frozen in another time.

More than appearance

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, our understanding of campuses is formed by more than physical appearance.  After all, colleges and universities are cultural institutions.  Their campuses are expressions of multigenerational effort, rather than transient commercial enterprises.  They may seem to be static and immovable yet they are evolving all the time.  Sometimes evolution is signaled by bulldozers and cranes.  More often it is at a granular level, room by room, floor by floor, as existing buildings are made more consistent with present expectations.  Stewart Brand spoke of this type of constant evolution and improvement in How Buildings Learn.

Old Main and the Power Plant

Campuses are the result of many actions and many actors.  These are places created year by year, decision by decision.  Prior decisions restrict future decisions.  Let’s use two examples – Old Main and the Power Plant.

Many campuses have some form of “Old Main.” Richard Dober provided a loving account of these earliest vestiges of American campuses.  The location of Old Main was usually the first important decision.  The site was chosen for cultural reasons that were salient at the time.  Often these concerned some form of prominence such as the highest point of ground, relationship to other cultural artifacts, and/or ability to frame a campus green.  That first building was seldom demolished.  It became the first stake in the ground around which all else revolved.

The site of the first “Power Plant” was the second important decision shaping and restricting later decisions. The location of the first coal-fired steam boilers often determined future building sites.  As campuses grew, it made sense to extend the existing system of underground tunnels, pipes and power lines to serve new buildings.  New buildings were sited where they could be served through the extension of the first distribution systems.  After a few waves of expansion, the power plant site was no longer peripheral.  It became part of the core of campus.

Palimpsest

Over generations, the earth is scraped and re-scraped.  Streams are turned into storm sewers.  Obsolete buildings are repurposed or demolished.  Roads and parking lots are laid down and later reconfigured.  When the capacity of existing systems is exhausted, additions or wholesale redevelopment is required.

Through it all, the palimpsest of the campus sees multiple scrapings and rewriting.  The digital transformation of higher education is the most recent wave leading to scraping and rewriting.

Campus as Palimpsest is adapted from an unpublished manuscript  Campus Matters:  Place in a Digital World

 Michael Haggans, 2020

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