Campus architecture is campus marketing

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Summer 2002 by Padjen, Elizabeth S

From Celebrity Architects to Luxury Dorms, Colleges Make Building Decisions in an Attempt to Draw Students and Support

Architect Peter Kuttner is talking about trends in campus architecture: "The latest thing is `Live and learn putting classrooms right in the freshman dorms, so you go to class with the people you live with. My son was in one. He liked it because he could go to class in his pajamas."

Architect Chad Floyd reports on the new recreation center at Tulane (which boasts a Department of Campus Recreation "to satisfy your fitness and leisure needs"): "They have two pools--an outdoor and an indoor. Kids sit around the outdoor pool sipping ping coladas."

Perhaps you had a father like mine, who admonished me that college isn't about fun and games. Sorry, Dad. These days, college isn't just an education-it's a lifestyle.

No one knows that better than college and university administrators-especially the directors of admissions, who are on the frontline of the competition for prospective students. They know that the size of the applicant pool and the eventual admissions yield frequently depend on one factor: the campus tour. And that means that the weapon of choice in the marketing wars is architecture, specifically architecture that matches the expectations of prospective students.

"With the dramatic rise in tuition," observes James Crissman, a Watertown, Mass., architect and consultant to academic institutions embarking on building projects, "you might think the logical response would be more Spartan facilities, to show that you're holding costs down. Instead the opposite is true. Students want the most for their money."

Indeed, today's students are sophisticated consumers who shop for colleges the way they shop for anything else. Colleges have responded with equal sophistication, hiring celebrity architects and focusing on facilities that offer the cushy amenities that students expect: posh dorms resembling condos; restaurant-like dining facilities with satellite "bistros"; recreation centers resembling health clubs, complete with juice bars. With the exception of an uptick in laboratory construction, the focus has been almost entirely on what might president of Cambridge Seven Associates in Cambridge, Mass., points out, also happen to be appealing "naming opportunities" for prospective donors.

Branding, lifestyle, naming opportunities ... it wasn't always this way. Many New England campuses are blessed with beautiful buildings that grew from other impulses. Architecture had an unquestioned place in cultural and intellectual life; some educators also believed building design could contribute to moral as well as scholastic development-that it could even be inspirational. "Edward Thring, the Victorian headmaster of Uppingham in England, commented that `to have a good school, a man had to have good buildings,"' notes William Morgan, a professor of architectural history at Wheaton College who has studied campus architecture. "It was a pervasive sentiment in the 19th century. Educators were very conscious of civic responsibility."

Others believed that good architecture could secure a place for their institutions in the intellectual firmament. "As president of Princeton," says Morgan, "Woodrow Wilson chose the Gothic style for the campus, saying that with that simple move, he had `added a thousand years to the history of Princeton.'"

But "adding history" eventually fell out of fashion. Following World War II, the GI Bill opened higher education to waves of new students, and colleges needed space fast. The prevailing Modern style, a relatively less expensive style of architecture, allowed colleges to build more for less by touting the maxim that less is more. Modernism also matched the growing spirit of intellectual freedom; a progressive institution demanded progressive buildings. Like Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard and Eero Saarinen's hockey rink at Yale, these tended to be buildings that deliberately defied the architectural traditions of the campus.

Perhaps inevitably, architectural defiance in turn fell out of fashion, following trends in design but also in response to an increasingly conservative student population. "Students are extremely conservative-- shockingly so," observes Chad Floyd, a partner in Centerbrook Architects in Essex, Conn. "They are the most conservative voices on campus committees and the most determined protectors of tradition."

When the last of the baby boomers passed traditional college age, campus administrators confronted serious demographic challenges. "Marketing" took hold in educational parlance and in campus building decisions. For example, Floyd notes that prospective community college students are attracted to buildings that look corporate, suggesting the work world that some of them come from and to which many of them aspire. After nearly two decades of marketing experience, it seems that colleges and universities have learned important lessons. The difference today is that their target audiences have learned their lessons, too, and now come from a consumerist culture that makes them very demanding customers.