Campus Changes

One of the most exciting things about the last few months at the University of North Dakota is watching the new campus plan come into focus around the quad. This plan also involves updating some venerable buildings, tearing down some genuinely tired campus structures, and also connecting various buildings together so that campus denizens that move from one building to the next without being bothered by our interminable winter. On a very basic level, the changes are nice. The new student union is nice, the refurbished library is nice, the new business school is nice, and my new office is nice. Everything feel fresher and gives off a bit of “new campus smell.”

Watching the changes take place over the last five years or so has gotten me thinking a bit about the relationship between campus buildings, campus spaces, and the purpose of a college campus. As I’ve said more than once on this blog, campuses embody the key tension in higher education between tradition and innovation. The former evokes the kind of emotional attachment to a place and experience that binds together generations of students and helps to make a diploma recognizable commodity. The latter, of course, represents the bread and butter of progressive education as universities embody the spirit of technological, scientific, and, at their very best, social experimentation and change. As a result, every generation will invariably experience the same campus, but not necessarily the same institution.   

Colleges and universities have long struggled the find the balance between these tradition and innovation and recently have felt increasing pressure from politicians and cultural critics to simultaneously pump the brakes on the progressive promise of education and to accelerate (or at very least prioritize) technological innovations (especially those with clear monetary value) and to prepare students for a future in a rapidly changing workforce.

Finding an architectural signature that reflects these tensions is not an easy task. It involves maintaining a familiar and recognizable shape and form of campus, while also updating the function and appearance of buildings. At UND this has so far involved major renovations to the library, to O’Kelly Hall, to Carnegie Hall, and some upgrades to Gillette and, in the near future, Merrifield. A new college of business building and a new education building now face the quad as well.

More significant is the closing of the quad to cars by turning the road that ran along the east side of the quad into a rather monumental walkway and creating a similarly monumental walkway that connects the northern side of the quad to second avenue (which has also become a pedestrian only on campus).

The spirit behind all of these changes is a good one.

That said, the changes to quad in particular are weird and maybe embody the persistent tension between tradition and innovation on our campus. 

Some of the most obvious issues with the changes to the campus quad are related to the new pedestrian spaces created when they closed the road that ran along the east side of the quad. The new walkways are remarkably wide. In a functional sense, I expect this is to allow for both walking and bike traffic and perhaps to facilitate the removal of snow. In a visual sense, though, these vast paved paths stand in awkward contrast to the college Gothic buildings that flank the east side of the quad. The width of the pathways rob the facades of some of their intimacy and the quiet irregularity of their rhythm which reflects their continuity with Gothic buildings in Medieval Europe and the tangled web of narrow paths and roads characteristic of the Medieval village. Instead, there are paths which would be completely appropriate for steadier rhythms of modernist or even Neo-Classical facades. Perhaps the functional character of these walkways speaks to practical elements of campus architecture or our growing sense of discomfort with the traditional spirituality and intimacy implied by Gothic revival architecture. 

(On a much simpler level, it seems fair to ask: what’s with all the paved concrete surfaces? Why have we eliminated a road only to turn it into a parking lot?)

Exacerbating the strongly alienating experience of walking along the weirdly wide walkways is that recent effort to connect the various buildings by extending their facades. On the one hand, this does ensure that the campus retains a kind of common architectural language. On the other hand, imposing college Gothic facades are terrifying and rob these otherwise comfortable buildings of their sense of comfortable scale.

This is particularly significant for our campus for two reasons. First, we’re not a massive institution by most standards, but we are a good bit bigger than all but one institution in the state. With over 10,000 students, we are also larger than many of the towns and cities in North Dakota and across the region. College Gothic buildings, however, helped the manage the sense of scale by creating a campus with free standing buildings that were often around the same size and designed in the same style as local schools. I’m not sure whether this was deliberate or just a happy coincidence of the same architects working on campus buildings and schools throughout the area. The result, however, was a very approachable campus that was likely to be the largest institution (or community) ever experienced by many of our regional students.

Added to this familiarity was the larger tradition of College Gothic architecture as inviting, personal, and even intimate. The irregularity of the buildings invited students and faculty to explore their hallways, offices, and classrooms and enjoy the unique, and often, private spaces that these buildings offered. To be honest, just writing that made me feel a bit like a creeper. The idea that college campuses have intimate, private, and subtle spaces is both problematic for a society that is increasingly concerned about predatory behavior especially when great disparities in power exist. Moreover, the connection of College Gothic to Medieval elitism, spirituality, and irregular and personal encounters with knowledge contravenes the increasingly democratic, secular, and professionalized character of higher education. The result is a tension the Medieval and the modern which may be every bit as significant as the balance between the practical need to connect buildings to allow the campus community to move between them in relative comfort and the desire to keep campus feeling familiar. 

The results are a little of neither. Not only have the connections between buildings upset the familiar sense of scale, but they’ve also created a imposing Gothic facades that scream authority and hierarchy rather than democratizing professionalism. 

This is further compounded interior spaces that are well-appointed, but also weirdly modern making them incongruous with the external appearance of buildings. To be fair, there is an effort to create comfortable spaces for students to gather. I also appreciate the designs that include unexpected spaces and narrower corridors in the place of the standard institutional double-loaded design. Even classrooms show a pleasant irregularity in design allowing for different class sizes, different modes of instruction, and different kinds of learning. 

At the same time, there seems to have been a concerted effort to separate faculty office areas from classroom areas which means that faculty spaces are awkwardly quiet and removed from the bustle of campus life. Since isolated faculty offices can be uninviting and intimidating (especially to first-generation students), office spaces were given class panels in their walls to expose faculty working spaces to the hallways and allow light to pass from the outside of the building to the halls. This is nice and certainly makes faculty offices feel more inviting to students, but their separation from classroom areas still holds them at a remove.

Like the mixture of College Gothic and large paved walkways and the intimate familiarity of Gothic buildings and the intimidating scale of nearly continuous facades, this design sends mixed messages. Faculty are visible at work in their offices, but also set apart from classroom and, I’d contend, some of the main currents of campus life. 

Over time, I’m sure the reconfigured campus will develop its own rhythms and the community with invariably transform even the most intimidating architecture into something familiar and safe. For now, however, it feels like campus is learning a different language and making all the little mistakes that one might expect from any effort to bridge a gap between two ways of speaking, thinking, and acting.

And the transformations of the campus quad are not yet complete. As Merrifield is being prepared to undergo a massive renovation and transformation, the quad quietly awaits what this new lease on life will say to the rest of campus.