Ideas in Things

By Daniel Kelley, FAIA  

Most of us have deep feelings about the community that developed during our college years, when we left home and became proto-adults. In that process we absorbed new ideas, socialized ourselves, and discovered who we might become. Later, we returned to those campuses with memories of events tied to those places, and found that they had changed. This is the way for dynamic institutions. Universities build upon what was there, revealing what the institution sees as no longer necessary, what was essential to keep, what required transformation, and what had to be built anew.  

We are sensitive to the physical changes that we find at colleges and universities because they are broadly recognized, historically and contemporaneously, as fertile places for architecture to flourish and encourage community. The best of them, small cities with their own urbanism and character, bind a curated collection of buildings and spaces with the ongoing mission of the institution — to be a consistent voice of relevancy to our changing society.  

Why am I still excited when my firm wins a project for a campus? It is the joy of adding to the dense matrix of materials and ideas, of joining the family of buildings and spaces in their unique evolution and growth, as well as using the commission as a podium from which to reassert the power and value of architecture in the contemporary conversation (and in daily use!) There are increasing pressures for universities to lead in social initiatives that architects can acknowledge, but not necessarily solve with buildings. Should this be added to the architect’s role — or does it shift the traditional aspirations away from design excellence?  

We know that good architecture can bring people together. That is the value of art. This common maxim could use more scrutiny, for within it we can identify specific objectives that apply to college and university architecture, such as planning for value, continuity and growth; using craft to connect people through the character of materials; and accommodating the evolving nature of how humans occupy space. 

Universities are called to acknowledge and foster the human connections that are critical for social health. This is doubly challenging because there are so many ways that the word “community” is associated with a university — and the word can sometimes feel over-used and under-defined. At the risk of being reductive, perhaps we can narrow the focus of the word for this brief essay and identify it with the impact that architecture can make under the headings of Object, Space, and Place. 

OBJECT  

What is the language and legacy of the community of objects (that is to say, buildings) that make a campus? A modern university has scores of buildings assembled through decades or centuries. Many are of high quality, in part because they represent the aspirations of the founders and, even in carefully curated campuses, represent a variety of architectural styles, often by talented and celebrated architects. The kinship of these objects has mostly to do with their relative locations and adjacencies, whether the campus is of whole cloth (such as Columbia or Duke) or evolutionary (such as Cornell or Penn). Through time they can share a common language — even across styles — in materials, formality, scale and craft.  

Juxtaposed, jostling, shadowing: These objects convey messages and lessons across time, representing the earnest attempts of architects to reflect the current thinking about art, design, and educational culture as well as expressing ever-advancing construction and system technologies. The buildings usually outlive the programs for which they were designed, so their lasting value comes from how they can be productively transformed. In an essay on this subject, my former partner Bob Shuman wrote, “a conceptual basis for architecture that is generated from the language of the building itself is inherently more enduring....” Their relationships are cumulative and collective, expressing continuity of mission. In one sense, campus buildings have nothing to do with the people who happen to be using them when the polaroid is taken. They are a family of their own. The hopeful architect strives to add richness to the collection of objects that is its own ongoing institutional achievement, never mind what happens inside. The architect alone is trained for this. 

SPACE  

Universities are equally recognized by the spaces between the buildings, which unite them in a comprehensive whole: a campus. As with their opposites (the objects), these spaces have form, definition, scale, character, and utility. They have portals that link them to each other in a continuum of movement and vista. These spaces can share an archetype (the distinctive college quadrangles of Oxford University) or can recognize other influences in a legacy of space-making, such as urban patterns or landscape features (Yale and the New Haven grid; Dunn’s Wood at Indiana University). Of course, spaces have diverse potentials, inviting varied scales of belonging, including and perhaps most importantly providing a physical forum (rather than a virtual one) where people can gather for common cause in the noble tradition of campus activism. 

At most universities, the character of the campus is preserved by its primary spaces, even as it is redefined at its margins through development and growth. Like buildings of different ages, spaces have history, their forms deriving from when and why they were developed. Spatial character varies, from the original campus quad, with its diagonal pathways, to the squiggly non-places between clusters of contemporary student residences. New buildings and land acquisition bring opportunities to create new primary spaces and circulation; however, an integrated campus relies on smartly conceived transitional and support spaces, often made in association with infill projects. If Louis Kahn was right that “a plan is a society of rooms,” then perhaps a campus is a society of spaces? 

How can objects and spaces become a unified whole that conveys the collective message of the university? Spatial continuity (formal and informal) unites material objects (buildings) just as the spaces between individually struck musical notes bind acoustic objects to become music. Our own University of Pennsylvania — dense, cumulative, and diverse — is an excellent example of cohesion. It is an amalgam of buildings, achieved by establishing significant and subtle relationships, a continuum of old and new within a consistent landscape carpet of path, green, and art. The scale of spaces is varied, with a park now perceived as the center of campus, having been created almost a century after the original buildings facing it were erected. Two major streets (Locust and Woodland), now absorbed by the university and re-purposed for pedestrians, integrate the campus with the structure of the city. The older buildings reflect this history, while the new ones respect it. The surrounding urbanity of Philadelphia’s street grid is honored and today being re-acknowledged after a period of inwardness.  

The Academic Research Building for Wharton (2021), located at 37th and Spruce Streets and designed by my firm MGA Partners, is an example of how a building can become relational with adjacent objects and the patterns of the campus. As a trapezoidal volume composed of constituent elements rather than a single gestural form, it presents a portal to the historic residential Quad for those coming from the north; it completes the definition of Tannenbaum Plaza (Wharton’s “quad”) to the east; and it extends the trajectory and vistas of Woodland Walk to Spruce Street and southward beyond. Consideration of these and other relationships was the foundation of our attempt to achieve deep resonance within the campus. 

PLACE  

Finally, how is the community of people who are attached to a university — faculty, administration, students, staff, visitors, alumni, etc. — acknowledged in the creation of specific spaces that promote interaction and, more importantly, instill the broader sense of mission that lifts “space” into what can be defined as “place”? Perhaps a university theater can provide an example. Commissioned to design a performing arts center at Indiana University (1997), we asked the chair of the Theatre and Drama Department, a native Midwesterner, to express his hopes for the character of a 450-seat theater that would anchor the building. His passion was collecting American prints, particularly those of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, so it was no surprise when he insisted that all 450 seats be in one block — no balconies, no aisles, no “better seats” — the entire audience grouped together as one, responding in unison to the stories being told onstage.  

Beyond encouraging a community to sit together, it is our view that university architecture can express human connection through craft and technology. People feel associated with buildings when they recognize, even for a moment, that fellow humans (their own ancestors, maybe) assembled them with intelligence and dedication to their trade. But this is not just a matter of “time-honored” craftsmanship. Experimentation with new products and fabrication methods celebrates the advanced research being carried out in labs across the campus. Also, it narrates the evolution of how we have built and, today, demonstrates our recognition of the ecological impact of the material and formal choices we make.  

Design can also express the changing universe of the community of scholars and educational theory in an accelerating data-centric environment that confronts traditional allocations of space. In commissioning my firm to transform the vast and tired library at the center of the campus (2024), the president of Northeastern University in Boston sought to test conventional thinking about the use and utility of information, as represented in the library’s program, space, and construction methodology, against “experiential learning,” which is a foundation of the university’s co-op model. The project removes and replaces (almost) all books with “program-less” spaces: imagine Bloomingdale’s S, M, L, XL brown shopping bags. This arrangement supports a pedagogy of “humanics,” which stresses new literacies of data, technology, and human communication, as well as critical thinking, cultural agility, and entrepreneurship. Perhaps this sounds like bits of a TED Talk. Nonetheless, the results are spatially potent, although it is too soon to tell how this experiment in place and mission will change academic form and habit. 

*** 

As I was composing this essay, I came across the announcement of a provocative academic symposium called, “Who is the Architect?” The event “considers changing forms and formats of architectural practice in light of social, environmental, and technological urgencies that are challenging old boundaries of professional agency and disciplinary expertise.” Are these the grounds upon which university thought leaders are strategically distancing themselves from designing and making buildings, and thus redefining architectural studies as primarily cultural, sociological, ecological, and techno-futuristic? If this is so, who will have the training and perspective to fashion enduring buildings that satisfy the senses? How will universities, which rely on authentic and carefully crafted architecture as a part of their place-making, respond? 

All people are drawn to the joy of architecture, and to the universities that collect accomplished buildings to shape their campuses. We love them for their substance, for their legacy, and for their ability to quicken us. To have a future of great buildings, there must be architects with the talent and skill to make them and be sanguine about — if not resistant to — the growing forces that distract and divert them from their craft. The physical nature of form, proportion, texture, contour, scale, pattern, formality, composition, etc. is always with us. This is understood by all those who take a moment to contemplate buildings, making their own connections to the ideas of art and society that architecture offers. 

Let’s encourage architects to focus on what they can achieve in skillfully designed urbanism, buildings, and landscapes, creating environments that support society as “places” that are manifestations, and even generators, of community. And if community, defined by social cohesion and good health, is strengthened by how buildings and spaces fill our senses and satisfy our needs, then let’s celebrate the American poet William Carlos Williams, whose concise line, “no ideas but in things,” is a proclamation of the universal truth of the physical world. 

Daniel Kelley, FAIA, a principal of MGA Partners since 1990, leads the overall approach to design and artistic continuity of the firm’s portfolio of architecture. 

CAPTIONS: 

THE FORM OF SPACE Penn’s urban campus integrates the original street patterns; Oxford University is defined by its distinctive quadrangles; Indiana University is arrayed around a forested landscape, 1905 

PHOTOS: HALKIN MASON PHOTOGRAPHY (UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA); ALAMAY STOCK (OXFORD UNIVERSIITY); IMAGE COURTESY OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON (DUNN’S WOOD /OLD CRESCENT) 

FACETS OF COMMUNITY Ruth Halls Theater at Indiana University emphasizes collective unity; in 1928, two students illustrated an experiential plan of the verdant Bryn Mawr College campus; Columbia’s Low Library, 1893 by McKim Mead & White, is a defining object  

PHOTOS: HALKIN MASON PHOTOGRAPHY (RUTH HALLS THEATER); COURTESY OF BRYN MAWR COLLEGE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS (MAP OF BRYN MAWR COLLEGE) 

CHANGE AS GROWTH Northeastern’s Snell Library removes its books to create a place for students to collaborate through data; the Wharton Academic Research Building is infill that completes an unresolved campus space  

PHOTOS: HALKIN MASON PHOTOGRAPHY