Selections from an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online (by Lawrence Biemiller, January 28, 2008)

"At Yale, Architects Consider Universities as Patrons"

New Haven, Conn. — A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is partly responsible for two of the most striking and controversial buildings of the past 10 years — Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall and Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, both at MIT — said Saturday that “mindless commodity architecture” should be no more acceptable on college campuses than “second-rate physics or banal history.”

“It is a fundamental responsibility of universities to pursue architecture and urbanism at the highest intellectual level and the highest level of cultural ambition,” said the professor, William J. Mitchell, who teaches architecture and served for 10 years as architecture adviser to MIT’s former president, Charles M. Vest. In the latter capacity, Mr. Mitchell said, his job was “to be a persuasive advocate of architecture in the broader community” and to help foster “lively, informed discourse about architecture and its role.”

Mr. Mitchell was one of a dozen speakers at an engaging but underpublicized Yale University symposium entitled “Building the Future: the University as Architectural Patron.” The symposium, half architectural-history lesson and half pep rally for architects who work on campuses, was built around the university’s annual Brendan Gill Lecture, named after the former New Yorker architecture writer. This year’s lecturer was David Brownlee, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s art-history department. ....

Karen Van Lengen, dean of the University of Virginia’s architecture school, was one of several speakers who worried that “branding” had “hijacked the architectures of actual spaces and actual experiences.”

At her institution, she said, the Rotunda has become the university’s brand. “It’s our logo. It’s on our letterhead, it’s on napkins. It’s on everything that we do at UVa. And this branding phenomenon has driven much of the decision-making process at UVa, particularly in the recent past.”

“So I guess the question I want to ask today,” she said, “is, How does a university deploy planning, architecture, and landscape architecture to support and project its mission beyond the imagery level alone, and equally important, how can design support the real experience of teaching, learning, and research? I’d like to make the case that as clients in this arena of architecture and planning we look a little deeper, past the wallpaper solution — as we refer to it at UVa, the Jefferson wallpaper solution — that is so prevalent, not only on my campus but all across America.”

Ms. Lengen also asked how universities could be persuaded to offer more design opportunities to promising young architects, just as promising young scholars are offered interesting research projects. Laura Cruickshank, university planner at Yale, said that was a question she struggled with.

“On the one hand, I think it is the university’s responsibility to do that, and on the other hand, I’m not exactly sure how to achieve it,” said Ms. Cruickshank. She said that deadlines tied to the campus calendar — “You have to finish the residential college before the students come back and move in” — tended to “push us away from using or recommending one of the smaller kinds of firms.”