University Trends

Book excerpt: A university campus is a place with special resonance: conjuring images of cloistered quadrangles and wood-panelled libraries, often echoing centuries of scholarly tradition. And yet it is also a place of cutting-edge science, interactive learning, youth, vibrancy, and energy. It is this dual nature which makes the physical environment of a university so dynamic as well as a highly challenging landscape to design and manage successfully. Today, the scale of the pressures and the rate of change facing higher education institutions are greater than ever.? Squeezed public spending, rising tuition fees and the growing education ambitions of developing nations are set against a backdrop of rapid technological progress and changing pedagogies. What are the repercussions for the physical realities of university planning and architecture? And how are university campuses adapting to contend with these pressures? University Trends introduces the most significant, widespread and thought-provoking trends in campus design today. Part 1 identifies current trends such as starchitecture, large-scale campus extensions, adaptive re-use, and international branch campuses. Part 2 profiles each trend via highly-illustrated, global case studies of well-publicised as well as lesser-known projects. The essential guide to current and future trends in campus design.