When English colleges were being developed, first at Oxford and shortly thereafter at Cambridge, the chapel was at the center of the diagram. The cultures of these institutions were only slightly removed from the monasteries of the Middle Ages.  It was in such cloistered setting that teaching and scholarship had been maintained through the aegis of the Church.

At Oxford and Cambridge, the chapel and its schedule of worship continued to be central to the life of each college. And so it continued for more than 300 years. By the early 1800s it was possible for Thomas Jefferson to conceive a new American university in Charlottesville in which the library took over the center of the diagram. It was there that the essential role of books and the printed page became the symbolic heart of the university.

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Once when I met with a group of university architects from Canada and the US, we marveled at the beauty of the campus and the apparent coherence of the values that had shaped its design for more than a century.

The campus had come through the middle decades of twentieth century without either the brutalism or simplistic excesses of modernism.  Historic spaces had been preserved and strengthened.  Scale had been respected.  Connections had been maintained and improved.  All in all it was a place that showed the effects of care and deep stewardship over an extended period of time.

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