Abstract: The Echo of History Henry Millon more urbane notions — the Gothic quads of Princeton, the “yards” of Harvard, the “typologies” of Yale, the red-tile roofs of Stanford. A Winning Formula The idea for the Campus Guides series originated in 1995, with the first titles appearing in 1997. Since then, Princeton Architectural Press has produced, on average, two or three new volumes a year. According to Nancy Eklund Later, the current series editor, the guides are primarily intended to “give students and alumni a sense of the place. This sense of bonding is what a college is all about.” Most of the books achieve this goal nicely. After a series of forwards and introductory essays, each proceeds to a series of walks. In most volumes, these are organized by precinct, but in others, such as that for Stanford, they trace the development of the campus through time. At IIT (a small campus) there are three walks; at larger campuses there may be as many as ten or eleven. Each walk is generally preceded by a short thematic description, and each build- ing along the way is credited and fully described. Graphically, each guide also contains a handsome colored axonometric of the entire campus, and important buildings and spaces are photographed, sometimes quite evocatively. Many of the universities selected, Later explains, come from a wish list of campuses whose architectural and planning history have known merit. In other instances, however, universi- ties and colleges have contacted PAP, asking that it produce a guide, some- times in honor of a special occasion. Of the authors and photographers involved, some, like the campus histo- rian Paul Turner, have been recruited from among known scholars. In other cases, relatively unknown contribu- tors — often professors at the college in question — have been discovered, who have already done much of the work needed on their own time. IIT was selected for the most recent volume because PAP felt it had not paid enough attention to Mod- ernist planning ideas, concentrating almost exclusively on more romantic and/or classical campus schemes. In this regard, an important part of the IIT book is a lengthy essay on the legacy of Mies Van de Rohe — from the Bauhaus to Crown Hall. The book also corresponds with IIT’s own renewal of interest in its campus. For years the institute was content to rest on the laurels of the Mies plan. But it recently undertook a major landscape improvement program. Two buildings for a new century are also now complete — a student center by Rem Koolhaus, and dorms by Helmut Jahn — both occupying extremely difficult sites beneath and adjacent to elevated mass-transit tracks. According to current plans, the IIT book will be followed later this year by guides to the University of Chicago and Smith College. Other campuses documented in the series include Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Rice, Virginia, California Berkeley, Washington, UCLA, Columbia, Cranbrook, Cincinnati, West Point, Pennsylvania, Phillips Academy Andover, Vassar, Dartmouth and Oberlin. The mid-1960s were tumultuous years for universities and institutions in much of the world. Increasing numbers of students sought entry to universities with overburdened and inadequate facilities. Students, rein- forced by members of the staff and the general public, made clamorous appeals and demands that university administrations and government ministries institute structural and cur- ricular reforms, in addition to expand- ing the university system. While the urgency of their appeals may now largely have faded into history, it is important to remember how seminal this period was in terms of reformu- lating the relationships between the university and society at large. In 1966, in the midst of the tur- moil, the Program in Urban Ter- ritorial Planning in the School of Architecture at the University of Venice undertook a research proj- ect to address some conceptual and physical aspects of the crisis in higher education throughout the world. The project sought to examine the plan- ning and buildings that were needed in founding new universities and institutes, as well as enlarging those already existing. This multivalent research program eventually resulted in an influential book, Pianificazione e Disegno delle Universita, edited by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo, who was in the midst of replanning the University of Urbino, a dispersed uni- versity, with residential facilities. The volume was organized in four parts. The first was an urbane introduction by De Carlo to a full range of problems, issues and con- siderations that govern the planning and construction of new university buildings and campuses. The second, by Luciano De Rosa and Piergior- gio Semerano, presented illustrative materials — photos, charts, tables, Millon / The Echo of History
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-15
Language: en
Type: article
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