The oldest university in north america, accepting students since 1553, was founded at

During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) only one university, that of Hamburg, was newly established (1919). The University of Cologne , which had existed once before, was refounded in the same year. However, the number of students nationwide soared from 60,000 in 1914 to 120,000 in 1919. This explosion in the student population was only partly due to the war-related postponement of enrollments. In 1933 the student population reached 133,000, compelling the universities to accept considerably more students than in the past. The young democratic state faced serious problems (inflation, economic crises) funding the universities, almost all of them public. Despite these difficulties though, the quality of Germany’s universities remained high. A special institution in this academic landscape was the Bauhaus , a small art and industrial design school that went on to have profound influence on university architecture and design alike.

Architectural transition phase: Hamburg, Cologne, and the Bauhaus

A comparison of the University of Hamburg and the University of Cologne , both created during the interwar period, delineates the transition phase from traditional European university design to principles of the Modern Movement in architecture. The two institutions still have their main entrance on important streets, forging a strong relation to the urban public space.

The University of Hamburg , designed by Hermann Distel (1875–1945) and Ernst Ludwig Grubitz (1876–1936) and built in 1919, still complies with the traditional building typology of a symmetric main façade on a major street and a portico in front of the entrance hall. It has large inner courtyards, pitched roofs, and a classical façade layout (Fig. 12.41), retaining the characteristics of a nineteenth-century building.

University of Hamburg in the early 1920s.

Source and copyright: University of Hamburg . Arbeitsstelle für Universitätsgeschichte. Reprinted with permission.

The University of Cologne , planned in the late 1920s and opened in 1934, incorporates some principles of the Modern Movement (Kantner, 1969). The Bauhaus and Congrès internationaux d’architecture modern (International Congresses of Modern Architecture), or CIAM,6 had already proclaimed new principles of architecture and urban design . The idea was that space and buildings should no longer be bound to and organized in traditional block figures but rather were to be dissolved into detached, solitaire buildings with flowing space between them. Going somewhat in this direction but still looking back to traditional patterns, the Cologne building, designed by Adolf Abel (1882–1968), is oriented with the main entrance facing an important road passing the area, but its back opens toward a park belt (Fig. 12.42). It still forms an entire shaped configuration of linked wings, with courtyard-like interspaces. However, the wings are in the process of becoming detached from the entire figure and moving into the flowing space (Fig. 12.43).

University of Cologne , main building. Architect Adolf Abel.

Source: Photo Kreyenkamp in the 1930’s. Rheinisches Bildarchiv. Reprinted with permission.

University of Cologne , Main Building, 1929–1934. Architect Adolf Abel. Aerial view.

Source: Photograph by Aero-Lux Frankfurt am Main, 1952. Rheinisches Bildarchiv. Reprinted with permission.

Since 1925 the Bauhaus Design School at Dessau has embodied this concept of the free-standing ensemble, rejecting traditional European principles of streets and blocks, of front façade and backyard (Fig. 12.44). True, it is only on a small scale, but impressive nonetheless and has had massive impact on the further development of architecture and urban design. Its short, but conflictual, history (1919–1932) reflected the swift rise of the Modern Movement in Germany under the Weimar Republic , during which it emanated radical new design ideas for the industrial age internationally. But it was shut down as early as 1932 by Nazi intervention. Its last director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), later emigrated to the United States , where he was able to apply Bauhaus ideas to his design of the new campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago .

Bauhaus Dessau, 2009, Architect: Walter Gropius (1925/1926), south-eastern view.

Source and copyright: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Photo: Yvonne Tenschert (2009). Reprinted with permission.

However, modernism of the first half of the twentieth century was rather an appetizer than the main course, for it seemed to be looking back. Even in Germany, the center of modernism in the 1920s, modernism was not the dominant style as measured by the number of erected buildings. And it was abruptly interrupted after 1933.

Fascist states preferred a kind of neoclassic gigantomania combined with traditionalism. Academic humanistic education was just the opposite of Nazi educational ideals, which required soldiers. Few extensions of existing universities were erected, such as the Zintl Institute built at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Fig. 12.45).

Edmund Zintl Institute, built in 1942 at the Technical University Darmstadt .

Source and copyright: Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, Signatur R 4 Nr. 5020UF. Reprinted with permission.

Unlike the Modern Movement in Germany, its counterpart in Italy —Futurism and Rationalism —was partly affiliated with the fascist party. One of the great architects of this period, Guiseppe Terragni (1904–1943), was a splendid modernist familiar with the German Modern Movement but was a convinced fascist party member all the same.

The new campus for Sapienza University at Rome became one of the paradigms of fascist architecture (Bodenschatz, 2012). Marcello Piacentini (1881–1960) received the commission to design the New Sapienza in 1932. He mixed a traditional, neoclassic layout of the urban design and giant proportions with a modernist, purist design of façades, construction, and details (Fig. 12.46). He carried out only some of the buildings himself, enough to demonstrate the typical Italian attitude of the Mussolini period. Establishing a rigid urban design guide, he quite successfully directed some colleagues to create an entire ensemble. The spatial concept was not remote from historic urban fabrics in residential towns, whereas the architecture tended to embrace purism . Proportions, however, sometimes morphed into gigantomania, albeit more tolerably than in Germany. Piacentini did not work only in Italy . He also received planning commissions in other countries such as Portugal and Brazil , proving that his ideas were well-known internationally. They met the conservative imagination of that period.

The new campus of the Sapienza University in Rome (1938).

Source: Unknown photographer. Copyright: Public domain. Retrieved from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Piacentini#/media/File:Cittauniversitaria.

During the short Leninist period, the young Soviet Union was an experimental field of art and architecture . In Stalin’s time, however, the Soviet Union favored architectural concepts similar to those in the fascist countries. The new Lomonosov State University was an important element of the 1935 masterplan for the urban reconstruction and expansion of Moscow, intended to help make the city a modern capital of the first socialist country (Brumfield, 1993; Huber, 2007; Summerfield, 1998). The idea for the new university was to make it the nucleus of the main southwest development. It was to be the highest and most important of seven new planned high-rise landmarks. The monumental building complex rose west of the Moskva River between 1949 and 1953. Boris Iofan (1891–1976), who delivered the first draft, fell into political disgrace in 1948 and the design work was handed over to Lew Rudnev (1885–1956).

The widely ramified building system unfolds on a rectangular cross, according to strict hierarchical neoclassical axial planning. It is a giant palace with one main and two lateral forecourts, with dimensions larger than any absolutist palace ever, flanked by, and integrated into a vast geometric park area. The complex system is dominated by a central 36-story triply terraced tower culminating in a spire that holds the Soviet star aloft. This building, designed in what is called confectioner’s style, is a dictator’s showing off, claiming to be in the center of future world communism. Using historical details in a rude manner and transforming them into a giant verticalism, the jagged silhouette is designed to recall historical Russian city shapes. The construction system was a steel skeleton frame filled in with brick, covered with natural stone slabs, and adorned with monumental stone sculptures.

Inside it was equipped with modern Soviet technology of heating and vertical transportation . The high-rise building houses three faculties (geography, geology , and mathematics ), their museums , as well as the university museum, the university library, 23 lecture halls, 125 group workrooms, and 700 lab workplaces. The side wings provide living space for 6,000 students and doctoral candidates. The main buildings of the side wings have apartments for 200 professors. The auditorium has 1,500 seats. Lastly, the building complex includes other museums , shopping, and leisure facilities, including an indoor pool (Huber, 2007; Summerfield, 1998).7

As previously seen in Rome , universities were accustomed to demonstrating state and party power, visualizing ideological principles, exhibiting architectural positions of a dictatorial power by using giant proportions and putting them into spatial limelight (Fig. 12.47). This was for the time being the end of a central European process to separate universities more and more from their urban neighborhood, emphasizing their importance and make them to crucial state affairs. In the late nineteenth century universities started to be elevated, put on pedestals, lifted above the normal urban level. This kind of conservative neoclassical architecture was used for university planning on a giant scale in many countries of the world (Columbia University in New York , for example), however, European fascist and Stalinist designs topped all.

Lomonosov State University, Moscow .

Source: Max Pixel. Copyright: Public domain. Retrieved from http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Lomonosov-Architecture-Stalin-Moscow-University-1378927.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), a leading figure of the European Modern Movement in architecture and urban design during the 1920s, came in 1938 to the United States , where he was appointed professor at The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago . In 1940 he was commissioned to plan the new IIT campus. He brought in his ideas and experience of modernism about how to use industrial methods and modern materials for design and construction. His famous project combined the American university concept with the ideas of European modernism. It became an icon of modernity.

The solitaire, detached buildings form both a free-flowing space and a central interior green open space—the campus university concept. But the cubic buildings themselves had a totally new expression, for they are mostly steel and glass constructions, precise like machines, designed on an underlying technical grid of measures. The campus institutes were built in the following years up to the 1950s. Among them, the Crown Hall, a transparent steel-and-glass construction with its flat roof hanging from mammoth exposed steel frames, became a masterpieces of Mies van der Rohe and the Modern Movement itself (Blaser, 2001). The Crown Hall is still used by the architecture department, in which Mies was the most influential teacher for 20 years. Today, the buildings designed by him still look modern. It seems they are expressing the timeless prosaic modernity of rationality—technology’s promise to solve the future problems of the human race forever, dissolving history in rationalism and functionalism . A wrong promise, as it soon turned out. And a joke of history was that one of the master’s best scholars at IIT, Helmut Jahn, later became a leading architect of Postmodernism , designing decorative skyscrapers in a kind of art deco style far from Mies’s “less is more.” History is never dissolved.

The urban design of IIT seems to create a central lawn and a nearly symmetrical figure based on the line of East 33rd Boulevard, which crosses the lawn. All areal outlines are totally integrated into the street lines of the neighboring quarters (Fig. 12.48). At the same time, the design aims to shape a central interior green space following the American tradition as exemplified by Columbia University in order to integrate the campus into its surrounding urban fabric. This idea, however, was rather difficult to achieve because of the streets and railway lines passing by. But looking at the realized building design, one finds no implementation of this concept, for the building’s access and orientation counteract rather than enhance the urban fabric. The Crown Hall’s main entrance lies at the averted side of the lawn, affording a pleasant view of it but actually showing its back to it (Fig. 12.49). The building is accessible only via small stairs from the main lawn. Nearly all building entrances on the campus are separated from the attached lawns by streets or bushes, a design leaving it bereft of the charming character it could have and making it into a prosaic working sector for white-collar engineers. Mies van der Rohe would surely have considered this statement to be a compliment.

Mies van der Rohe, Project for the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago . Final scheme, 1940.

Source: Johnson (1947, p. 135). Copyright: Public domain.

Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago , Illinois. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; completed 1956.

Source: © Joe Ravi (2011), via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0). Retrieved from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Crown_Hall_1.jpg.

After World War II , the process of decolonization led to the emergence of many new states in Africa , the Middle East , and Southeast Asia . Practically all new countries founded national universities, which were regarded as a prerequisite of economic and cultural development . Since the 1960s, a network of universities therefore spans the globe, though the knots of this net vary in distance from each other and in quality in different parts of the world.

The Sputnik crisis in 1957 triggered a fundamental discussion about the educational system and research in the western countries. As a result, the United States and most European countries multiplied research budgets and improved schooling. West Germany even declared its educational system to be a catastrophe and began inquiring into it. In the following years and decades, the university system greatly expanded. Growth of the spatial dimensions of universities and the number of enrolled students far surpassed that in the first half of the century. Throughout the world, university planning in many cases became an experimental field of the avant-garde movement in architecture and urban design.

The new campus completed in 1954 for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City, for instance, is a striking example of an attempt to combine architecture of the International Modern Movement with traditional Mexican elements of art , which, in turn, were a superimposition of pre-Columbian and Hispanic culture. UNAM’s library, designed by Juan O’Gorman (1905–1982), is a paradigm of this approach. It uses modern construction materials and exhibits the cubic style of the international Modern Movement , but the façades are covered with reliefs in a kind of Aztec style and Mexican wall paintings (Fig. 12.50). The content of the graphics, however, deals with history and science.

Central library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico on the Mexico City campus (built by Juan O’Gorman).

Source: Régis Lachaume (2006), via Wikipedia. Copyright: Public domain

Retrieved from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationale_Autonome_Universität_von_Mexiko.

A very bold project for a new university was realized by Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012), who designed most of the official buildings for Brazilia , the planned city that became Brazil’s capital in 1960. He designed a curved linear building 700 meters long (nearly half a mile), constructed with prefabricated concrete elements as a radical serial composition, adapting the design concept by Lucio Costa (1902–1998) for the whole town (Fig. 12.51).

Central Institute of Sciences—University of Brasilia , Brazil .

Source: Nossedotti (2011), via Wikipedia. Copyright: Gemeinfrei. Retrieved from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:ICC_UnB.jpg.

In Europe famous architects like Alvar Aalto (1898–1976, masterplan and many buildings for the new campus of Helsinki University of Technology since 1955), Giancaro di Carlo (1919–2005, masterplan and many institutes and dormitories for the new campus of the University of Urbino since 1965), and Ralph Erskine (1914–2005, buildings for the Frescati campus Stockholm since 1974) designed masterpieces of contemporary architecture for universities. The long list of such architecture grows each year, but this chapter’s discussion of the concepts of new campus development for the modern mass university focuses on the West German example illustrating extremely rapid expansion of the university system.

Urban and architectural design of the mass university, Germany’s example

Only a few universities were founded immediately after World War II . The French occupation administration created one Mainz in 1946 and another in Saarbrücken in 1948, both initially using abandoned German barracks. In the U.S. sector of West Berlin , the Free University of Berlin was founded, for Humboldt University was under Soviet administration .

Many university towns tried to extend the existing university areal into the city, following the European tradition. Because building plots were exceptionally rare at their historical sites, most of which were situated in old centers or at the edge of the inner city, the American paradigm of campus universities outshined urban alternatives. Only the outskirts provided enough space for new universities . The discourse about spatial visions and planning sites for rapid, large-scale expansions or new foundings of universities thus soon led to the ideal of the campus university. The United States had become the dominant cultural power, and German scholarship holders, returning from North America, reported enthusiastically about U.S. university life. An important influence on the discourse came from the Central Archive for University Planning (Zentralarchiv für Hochschulbau), established in 1963 at the University of Stuttgart and headed by Horst Linde. This institute analyzed American universities and declared the IIT campus to be exemplary. Up to that time, the notion of campus was not common in Germany, for universities had always been a part of urban culture and more or less integrated into the urban fabric and daily life.

Only a few years after the Sputnikschock in Germany, several new universities were founded: Bochum (1962), Regensburg (1962), Constance (1966), Bielefeld (1969), Kaiserslautern (1970), Bremen (1971), Kassel (1971), Bayreuth (1972), and Oldenburg (1973). Nearly all are campus universities laid out on large coherent areas on the outskirts according to a masterplan. Most of them were constructed very quickly, many buildings in the same style with the same material—mostly exposed concrete and a high percentage of prefabricated components. Compared to the American archetype of campus, they lack the rural charm of field (campus), yard, or lawn.

The labels used for the spatial elements are proving to be a conceptual confusion. Instead of a green center, for example, there is the idea of a forum, which means precisely the opposite—a central urban space . Hence, Bochum , Constance, and Regensburg have each a stone covered central open space, which looks much more like contemporary pedestrian areas or the satellite shopping centers of the 1960s and early 1970s. Constance reflects these contemporary ideas perfectly (Fig. 12.52). All details inside and outside the buildings are designed affectionately as a total artwork. Architecture, interior design , applied art , and landscaping work together, modeling an enormous sculpture integrated into the gentle moraine landscape of Lake Constance. However, it is hardly a campus in its original meaning but rather an artful “urban” space with closely related landscape. Bochum and Bielefeld have the charm of learning factories designed in the late style of classic modernism . Krefeld even has a covered passage like a shopping arcade, called a communication axis.8

The University of Konstanz , Germany, aerial view.

Source: Universität Konstanz (2012), via Wikipedia. Used under Creative Commons License Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Retrieved from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universität_Konstanz.

This first generation of universities after World War II . followed neither the old campus model nor the IIT campus design by Mies van der Rohe. Urban design paradigms of the Modern Movement had been moving from solitary ensembles to huge spatial figures since the late 1960s. It seems that the familiar conceptual notions rooted in the urban European heritage of universities could not abandoned all at once. That legacy continued to glow under modern cubes and surfaces of the machine age, obscured by wrong notions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, some areas of university expansion and new foundings were planned as campuses, far removed from the historical sites on the city periphery (Würzburg–Hubland Campus; Darmstadt –Lichtwiese, and the University of Bayreuth ), with the centers henceforth becoming real green areas (Fig. 12.53). Bayreuth is an evident example of a green center surrounded by faculties and a wide range of facilities. But even at the University of Bayreuth, the front façades of the buildings lack a clear internal orientation to the center. The main access is from a road surrounding the central green space. The campus design is obviously influenced by functional concepts for contemporary district centers of that time—a ring road for cars and supply surrounding the campus, pedestrian areas inside of it. In a nutshell, the American concept had become the beacon of the era but was not really adapted to its spatial concepts. Everybody still uses the label campus unthinkingly, even for the historical sites: the urban campus. what an odd contradiction.

Campus Lichtwiese, Technical University of Darmstadt , Germany, developed since 1967, status of 2015.

Source and copyright: Nikolaus Heiss. Retrieved from www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/orientierung/anreise/index.de.jsp.

Reprinted with permission.

The idea of monofunctional university areas in Europe has another root, too. It was wholly in accordance with the ideals of functionalism as set out in the Athens Charter of 1933. Each land use should find its very special place and space, according to its specific requirements (functions). Architecture and urban structures could thereby be optimized for those special needs: purely residential areas , purely commercial and industrial areas , recreation areas, infrastructure facilities, all separated from each other and connected by the transportation system. Large campus facilities were consistent with these planning concepts. The small-scale European mix of city and university facilities seemed to contradict the contemporary idea of functional organization and optimization of processes in the modern industrial society.

Reurbanization of Universities?

Old European universities such as Bologna , Paris , Cambridge , Oxford , and Montpellier expanded gradually on a smaller scale in different urban areas. Today’s Bologna still has all its facilities in the inner city areas. Many of its new university institutions are housed in restored landmarks, such as monasteries or formerly abandoned cinemas. University life there is reminiscent of past European times, with people walking in the well-restored city center; sitting in bars to discuss and prepare for the next lecture or seminar; taking an aperitivo after the last lecture; watching others, especially nice young students, famous writers, hip musicians, or even well-known politicians and beggars passing by, as in novels about earlier European urban life—or at least the way it is imagined to have been.

Other universities set in old city centers built campuses on the outskirts but kept their historic buildings within the city and added new buildings as far as possible. This situation pertains in almost all of the old European university cities, including Heidelberg, Tübingen , Marburg , Prague , Padua , Pavia , Leiden , and Amsterdam , to name only a few. Natural sciences, engineering, and university clinics have mostly moved to outside because of the special needs that their laboratories and machine halls entail, whereas the rector’s office, administration , humanities , and social sciences have remained at the historical locations.

Conversion of former military, industrial, and infrastructural areas

The economic changes brought about by globalization have made it necessary to abandon many large industrial areas and infrastructural facilities of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Projects to convert and reuse those tracts and buildings spawned new concepts featuring an urban mixture of functions and novel spatial patterns, sometimes integrating university facilities. An early example was the University of Kassel , founded in 1971 in a remote campus area. By the late 1970s, long before the effects of globalization, the architecture faculty was accommodated in what had once been an administration building of a former heavy-industry firm neighboring on the city center. Over the following decade, a new high-density university district with a traditional block structure was built on the adjacent abandoned factory terrain. In Heidelberg, a recent example of this architecture is the Bahnstadt, a new district situated on former railyard terrain connected to the main train station. The plan for the space is based on a mixed use concept that will integrate university functions . Even more spectacular is the new Hafencity university under construction on the waterfront of a vacated port area in Hamburg. After the new opera house, it has become the second important landmark of the new quarter.

Universities are thus no longer seen as bulky institutions for which it is difficult to find space. Rather, they are used as an initial investment, a driving force behind the urban development of large fallow land and problematic districts. Examples are the University of Milano -Bicocca , built on the site of the former Pirelli factory (Fig. 12.54), and the new University of Torino , both planned by the architectural firm Gregotti Associati . They incorporate abandoned areas and reused, partly historical industrial facilities. The architectural concept follows traditional European urban patterns such as street, square, and block. Some elements of Gregotti Associati’s projects recall Piaccentini’s university town, though on a smaller spatial scale, making university planning an integrated part of urban renewal, the reuse of industrial heritage , and the upgrading of run-down districts.

University of Milan -Bicocca, Italy . View of the Trivulzana Sqaure, 2013.

Source and copyright by Antonella Sgobba. Reprinted with permission from A. Sgobba.

Many of the universities built on the outskirts of cities in the 1960s or early 1970s have long since been incorporated into urban or suburban structures. Those campus areas are now regarded as obsolete . Despite their high-rises, their population density is low, and their monofunctionality makes them empty, uninviting districts on evenings and weekends. Both characteristics have been harshly criticized. Moreover, modern requirements for fire protection, escape routes, and energy-saving make it extremely costly to maintain and modernize buildings constructed in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Adopting a concept for densifying the once isolated, monofunctional Hönggerberg campus and for reclassifying it for mixed use, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich launched a phase of urbanization and urban integration of large, peripheral university facilities in 2004. Since then, nearly all sprawling campus areas on the outskirts have undergone critical analysis, reconsideration, renewal, and remodeling, which in many instances has also improved and expanded the historical university areas.

Even in the United States, the motherland of the originally introverted and remote campus concept, there are trends toward transferring research and teaching facilities to the urban context.

Especially in the United States , universities are now moving away from separating teachers’ places of life from those of students and toward selectively interweaving their range of research activities and educational options with the city. In 2010 Google bought a 2,700,000 square-meter former warehouse and administration building in Chelsea, one of New York’s hottest neighborhoods, for $1.8 billion. The main reasons were the opportunities offered by the city, but also the preferences of the employees, who no longer want to live and work in suburbia. Universities also see the advantage of an urban location for the recruitment of leading scientists and paying students. This was not always so. Forty years ago, most of the cities in North America were characterized by emigration , disintegration, crime, and poverty, and universities are still the most important institutional anchors of centers in cities such as Cleveland, Baltimore , and St. Louis . New York , on the other hand, has been growing steadily since the early 1990s, and “NYC” has now become an academic trademark. In 2012, according to the New York State Department of Education, more than half a million students were enrolled in the 102 colleges and universities located in the city, a good 6% of the population—and 11% more than in 2007. (Schindler, 2013, p. 25)

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Inauguration ceremony in the Cathedral of Basle , Switzerland , 1460. Bishop Johann von Venningen appoints provost Georg von Andlau (front left) as the first rector of the University of Basle . However, he gives the papal founding bull to the mayor of Basle. This anonymous drawing shows the institutional involvement of power at different levels: local (mayor), regional (bishop as sovereign of the canton), and international (pope). Very specific indeed was the fact that this papal bull was signed by an antipope whose reign was brief and recognized by only a few states, including the Swiss Confederation.

Source and copyright: Basle University Library AN II 3 (n.d.). Reprinted with permission.