Campus architecture is campus marketing

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

Colleges are quick to adopt what works for the competition. "The strength of many small colleges has been their sense of community," Kuttner notes. "Now the bigger institutions that previously promoted their academic offerings are starting to focus on community." "Lifestyle buildings" can solve that problem, instantly providing appealing communal and social spaces. Others are using architecture to stand out from the competition. The University of Cincinnati is nationally known for its collection of new buildings by celebrity architects such as Frank Gehry, Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman. Now MIT is developing its own collection: with new projects under construction by Gehry, Fumihiko Maki and Steven Holl, it seems determined to return to its postwar architectural heyday when its Kresge Auditorium and chapel by Eero Saarinen and Baker Hall dormitory by Alvar Aalto attracted international attention. But it's hard not to see a preoccupation with commissioning a new Gehry building as a somewhat more expensive version of, say, a student's preoccupation with acquiring a North Face fleece or Prada shoes. Despite protestations about pursuing good design and good value, ultimately both come down to wanting what all the other kids have.

With the growing tendency to see campuses as threedimensional brochures and buildings as photo-ops for virtual tours on Web sites, it's refreshing to talk to Paul LeBlanc, president of Marlboro College, where there is no sports program and the 320-member student body recently voted against putting cable TV in the dorms. Marlboro is in the midst of an ambitious building program, with new structures by Deborah Berke, Turner Brooks, Brian Mackay-Lyons, Roc Caivano and Dan Scully-all well-known in the architectural academy, but hardly brand names. "We started by posing three questions," LeBlanc recalls. "How should a serious intellectual community approach this process? How should we respond to the Vermont ethic of small is better? How can we respect the vernacular? The goal is to build in harmony with the intellectual tradition of this place."

LeBlanc acknowledges that Marlboro, like all small institutions, is competing for students but says that marketing has not been the primary motivation. Cynics might suggest that Marlboro is only the most recent example of the famed Vermont brand extension, but LeBlanc's claim is borne out by the fact that no photos of the new buildings are yet on the college's Web site.

Marketing breeds cynicism. As the academic world emulates the business world and gets caught up in the never-ending pursuit of customer satisfaction ("to satisfy your fitness and leisure needs"), educators should look to the work of their colleagues, John MacArthur, former dean of the Harvard Business School, and Robert Edwards, former president of Bowdoin College. Both are legendary for their advocacy of architecture as a means of creating community, combining pedagogical vision with design excellence to promote a sense of community and to sustain the tradition of the "academic village." Great architecture-buildings that are inventive, that fit the needs of their occupants, and that demonstrate an enduring civic responsibility to their environment-comes from the passion of individuals. Great academic buildings are the last bastion of symbolic architecture that reflects our intellectual traditions and highest humanitarian values. After all, no one is building cathedrals anymore.