From College to Campus: The Architecture of the College from the Middle Ages to Jefferson

Beyond monastic tradition, rules, statutes, and codes regulating conduct and behaviors gave origin to university colleges and the figure of the student. Since Middle Ages, plans on education were brought by reformers, moralists, and educators of different times to re-formulate pedagogical agendas. The rise of university colleges, like that in Paris and Oxford, and their territorial spread in scholastic Europe from the 13th century, the investment of patrons in building the so-called sapienza, and the hegemony of the Jesuit’s educational project, are key passages in the history of education in western civilization. For centuries the collegium was associated with the form of the courtyard within the city. From the 19th century, the invention of the ‘American campus’, as a result of the liberal reforms of Thomas Jefferson as architect and educator, brought to the gradual disappearance of the college. Focusing on these paradigmatic moments, this presentation will discuss about the relationship between statutes, pedagogical rules, and architectural form, from its origins to the rise of the idyllic campus, a new radical paradigm, which was purposely built to escape the city and to requestion the traditions of ‘monastic’ rules. In these examples, spaces like courtyards, halls, corridors, and rooms, besides defining abstract keywords of possible structural relationships in the definition of formal typologies, were, first of all, architectural elements that prevailed within these buildings, depending on the priorities established by the rule, in terms of educational ideology, conduct, and privacy.