An Architect Breaks Down the 5 Most Common Styles of College Campus

Every now and again on social media, the obser­va­tion cir­cu­lates that Amer­i­cans look back so fond­ly on their col­lege years because nev­er again do they get to live in a well-designed walk­a­ble com­mu­ni­ty. The orga­ni­za­tion of col­lege cam­pus­es does much to shape that expe­ri­ence, but so do the build­ings them­selves. “Peo­ple often say that col­lege is the best four years of your life,” says archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er in the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, “but it was also like­ly that it was some of the best archi­tec­ture you’ve been around as well.” He goes on to iden­ti­fy, explain, and con­tex­tu­al­ize the five build­ing styles most com­mon­ly seen on Amer­i­can col­lege cam­pus­es: colo­nial, Col­le­giate Goth­ic, mod­ernism, bru­tal­ism, and post­mod­ernism.

For exam­ples of colo­nial cam­pus archi­tec­ture, look no fur­ther than the Ivy League, only one of whose schools was built after the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence — whose author, Thomas Jef­fer­son, lat­er designed the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, draw­ing much inspi­ra­tion (if not always first-hand) from ancient Greece and Rome. “Iron­i­cal­ly, after the US declared inde­pen­dence, new­er schools want­ed to look old­er,” says Wyet­zn­er, a desire that spawned the endur­ing Col­le­giate Goth­ic style. Con­struct­ed out of mason­ry and brick, its ear­li­est build­ings tend to pick and choose fea­tures of gen­uine Goth­ic archi­tec­ture while mix­ing and match­ing them with the design lan­guages of oth­er times and places. More recent exam­ples have been stren­u­ous­ly faith­ful by com­par­i­son, incor­po­rat­ing gar­goyles and all.

When they arise, archi­tec­tur­al styles tend to align them­selves with the old or the new, and it was the lat­ter that over­took col­lege cam­pus­es after the Sec­ond World War. Take the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, which was designed whole by no less a Bauhaus-cre­den­tialed mod­ernist than Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe. Mod­u­lar, flat-roofed, and built with plen­ty of exposed brick, glass, and steel, its build­ings proved influ­en­tial enough that “near­ly every high school in the Unit­ed States that was built in the fifties and six­ties” was designed in more or less the same way — albeit with­out the ear­ly utopi­an mod­ernist spir­it, which by that point had devolved into an indus­tri­al empha­sis on “ratio­nal­ism, func­tion­al­i­ty, and hygiene.”

After mod­ernism came bru­tal­ism, the style of the least-beloved build­ings on many a cam­pus today. Coined by Le Cor­busier, the style’s name comes from béton brut, or raw con­crete, vast quan­ti­ties of which were used to shape its hulk­ing and, depend­ing on how you feel about them, either drea­ry or awe-inspir­ing struc­tures. The aes­thet­i­cal­ly promis­cu­ous post­mod­ernist build­ings that began appear­ing in the six­ties and mul­ti­plied in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies were more play­ful and his­tor­i­cal­ly aware — or all too play­ful and his­tor­i­cal­ly aware, as their detrac­tors would put it. If you think back to your own col­lege days, you can prob­a­bly remem­ber spend­ing time in, or around, at least one exam­ple of each of these styles, because large US col­lege cam­pus­es have, over time, become rich antholo­gies of archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ry. Would that most Amer­i­cans could say the same about the places they live after grad­u­a­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Peo­ple Hate Bru­tal­ist Build­ings on Amer­i­can Col­lege Cam­pus­es

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