The tradition of the American college campus is one of the few that we can call our own. Its purpose from the beginning was to create a place apart from the daily life of farm, factory and city.  The beginning was Harvard College which in 1636 was established with a few simple, rectangular brick buildings arranged around a rectangular lawn planted with trees. This lawn is now famously known as “Harvard Yard”.  It resides just a few steps away from Harvard Square the busy center of Cambridge, MA separated only by a brick wall and iron gates and it’s a world away. It’s pastoral.

While Harvard was a field punctuated by buildings, Stanford (Fredrick Law Olmsted, 19th century) was a building punctuated by courtyards.  At Harvard a building is a box that sits around open space at Stanford it’s clay (or more precisely, sandstone) with which to shape (or carve out) open space.  The two hundred and fifty years that separate them played a part in their differences but so did the climate:  compact rectangular boxes (“salt boxes”) kept rooms warm inside; whereas buildings that spread out, opened out, even configured half-in/half-out (loggias) were well suited to California.

About twenty years ago it was easy to imagine that public libraries in America might die out. The old (and by now somewhat tiresome) truism was that the world wide web where we could buy books at Amazon and find information at Google would kill them off. Even before the advent of the internet public libraries had experienced a half century of decline. This probably had something to do with the ubiquity of the inexpensive paperback which enabled a lot of people (though not all) to get their books at bookstores instead of libraries.  As big box and chain bookstores flourished, the library’s role in the daily lives of most Americans became less necessary, the stature with which libraries were once held diminished. 

The Romans were master builders and expert at using material extracted from the earth (harvested wood, quarried stone, cooked and cured soils such as tile, brick and concrete) in shapes (arches, vaults, domes, walls and ceilings) to accomplish structures which are to this day impressive. These builders didn’t have at their disposal the mathematics we have had since the 18th century –- trigonometry, calculus, quantitative and logarithmic equations.  All that mastery was achieved over years of trial and error. Mistakes were made, lives injured, many lost. Even after centuries of practice the building enterprise was mostly a slow and dangerous one. 

In the 1,500 or so intervening years between the demise of the Roman empire and the arrival of the 18th century the building of buildings (cathedrals, for example, many of which took generations to complete if they were completed at all) was still a craft, still based on trial and error, mostly intuitive, perpetually unsafe. The strength of character of those who committed their lives, sometimes gave their lives, to build something greater than themselves, sometimes without ever seeing their work completed, is astounding to contemplate. We still tour the world to see and admire what they built. Larger than life matters of the heart, mind and soul, matters of life and death, motivated them to do what they did. It was accountability in the extreme.

About 150 years ago technologies emerged that dramatically changed the way we live.  Electricity, steel and the internal combustion engine made possible the very tall building (or skyscraper) and the automobile. This in turn made possible extremes in how we live: super dense places with lots of tall buildings such as New York and super spread out places like the suburbs and edge cities of California.

Like any disruptive technology we were almost obligated to try them out, see them through, see what works, just as we are equally obligated to confront what doesn’t. (Portable digital technology is after only a decade of ubiquity and seemingly endless possibility now gripped by self-doubt).  Has the time not now arrived for us to evaluate what has and has not worked about the way we engage in making very tall and spread out places?

Most people would agree that most people learn to be racists.  We learn that there are races. As we grow into adults we learn to categorize, put people in boxes then pre-judge them based on the boxes.  Then we get better at it as adults.  When we bundle people into categories it’s harder for us to get past the generalizations (required to create the category in the first place) to see and appreciate the unique characteristics of the individual. I don’t know that we can ever pretend we do not categorize everything around us but we’d be more empathetic as persons and better as a society if we could get past that enough to appreciate what’s special about every person we encounter.

We would like our work to be well regarded by our peers.  Their opinions matter to us and they influence how we think.  Other architects’ work influences our work and we would hope ours theirs.  This is different from thinking our work is meant for our peers.  The buildings we design are meant for those who will occupy and experience them.  Do we care that these people like what we do? Do we care that what we do engages them, that they feel a connection to it or through it to each other? Do we care that a building feels true to where it is in the world—the time and the place? We do.  Are these aspirations—the respect of our peers and the satisfaction of those who live with our buildings-- mutually exclusive? They are not.