Harvard Campus and the Changing Nature of the University

The campuses and yards of Harvard University, located on both embankments of the Charles River in Cambridge and Allston, will serve as a framework for reflection. Located within the metropolitan system of Boston with its constellation of powerful universities such as MIT, Boston University, and others, our context parallels that of other highly dynamic campuses in the USA (Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, etc.) and on other continents. The studio will virtually tour these different institutions, allowing us to decipher the evolution of academic fields and corporate campuses.

The evolution of university campuses ranges from the first models of Oxbridge University, with traditional medieval colleges with cloisters imitating monasteries well integrated in the city, introducing the habitual conflicts between “town and gown,” to visionary ideas like the University of Virginia, with a system of isolated buildings around the campus, outside the city, designed by Jefferson. With these models of reflection and learning, and in accordance with master guidelines, campuses were made bigger and more complex, leading to a modern reorganization of the university system. This was particularly true after World War II, with the multiplication of scientific, artistic, and professional disciplines leading to extension and replication on a large scale.

New urban morphologies were then introduced, such as those of Gropius at the Harvard Graduate Center or Mies at the ITT in Chicago, which reinterpreted the traditional quadrangle. Some constitute genuine urban paradigms, while others are seen as simple instrumental pieces in university development. After this initial explosion of institutions, the various university systems became increasingly complex organizations with labs, museums, research centers, and startups, seeking to develop synergies between science and business with different spatial models.

In this third and current phase, we see a greater overlap with the knowledge-based campuses that constitute the most advanced sectors of today’s economy. It seems that we are moving from a city campus to a campus city system due to the abundant integration of more diverse forms of speculative reflection, but also of applied research that feeds the most creative production.

The studio will address themes such as the advantages of integration in the natural environment and the exchange between individual development and collective knowledge. We will exercise the contribution of urban design and urban architecture in this complex reflection that we call research by design.

Organizing the studio on campus allows for understanding and addressing a very immediate reality, while also comparing and contrasting it with the dynamics in which the realities of the knowledge society are set. The studio is, then, an exercise in simulation of how Harvard campuses could evolve in this third stage of the changing nature of universities without intending to solve the many real challenges that any present-day campus must face. The proposals will have above all a theoretical and academic value.