University Business - December 2007 - (Page 40)

INDEPENDENT OUTLOOK Creating Campus Appeal Architecture’s eﬀect on the message conveyed about an institution By Richard Ekman T HE BEAUTY OF A COLLEGE campus is a powerful inﬂuence on students’ choice of college and the aﬀection of alumni for their alma mater. No one truly understands what leads a student to select one college over another or why, many years later, the emotions of alumni are linked to speciﬁc places on campus. At some level, these individuals all recognize that the campus is the physical manifestation of an educational philosophy to which the college is committed and that is conveyed through educational experience. A central quadrangle, for example, is surely an expression of the goal of encouraging students, for whom studying is usually a solitary activity, to interact and literally cross paths with others as they move from one class or activity to another. A college where the chapel is the largest building on campus sends a diﬀerent message from one where the library or ﬁeld house is the biggest. On a campus where an “Old Main” houses the senior administration, the meaning is changed from when it once housed classrooms and faculty oﬃces. An older, well-preserved building in a prominent location tells visitors that the college values its traditions and its history. And the planning and creation of contemporary buildings signal the college’s willingness to foster the best of innovative architecture, thus contributing to an expansion of knowledge of and experience with the physical environment. Because the early days of American higher education were dominated by private institutions, many of the oldest and architecturally most signiﬁcant campus The Clossen Physical Education Center became part of Graceland U (Iowa) in 1967. Many years later, the emotions of alumni are linked to speciﬁc places on campus. buildings can be found on the campuses of private colleges and universities. The Council of Independent Colleges, with support from the Getty Foundation, has collected data about and images of 2,100 of these buildings, which are located on 389 campuses. Known as the CIC Historic Campus Architecture Project (HCAP) and led by architectural historian Barbara Christen, this project has a fully searchable website (www.cic.edu/hcap) that is proving to be of interest not only to scholars of history, architecture, education, and other disciplines, but also to admissions staﬀ members, facilities managers, and other institutional administrators. The website can be used to examine and compare buildings of a certain type— science labs, for example. It can also be searched by date and materials of construction, building function, architect/landscape designer, and geographic region. It oﬀers extensive bibliographic resources as well. The uses of the website are evolving well beyond the original idea. Recently, a consultant to a college that was about to renovate its 1950 library wanted to ﬁnd other institutions with similar buildings that had undergone major renovations. Ten minutes of searching on the CIC HCAP site yielded information about a half dozen colleges with libraries that ﬁt their search limits, and telephone calls to these colleges led to useful advice. In theory, an enterprising chamber of commerce could even promote a tour of a region’s colleges on the basis of the buildings the schools have identiﬁed as signiﬁcant. Campus planners and alumni often have very diﬀerent opinions about cam- 40 | December 2007 universitybusiness.com http://www.cic.edu/hcap http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of University Business - December 2007

University Business - December 2007 Contents College Index Company Index Advisory Board Editor's Note Behind the News Viewpoint Admissions On The Hill Marketing Future Stock Independent Outlook Technology Spending Survey '08 Conference Call A Working Education 30 Smart Business Ideas Educause in Emerald City What's New Calendar of Events End Note

University Business - December 2007

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