American Places ─ In Search of the Twenty-first Century Campus

For the college campus, "place" means much more than just geography and physical setting. It is the sum of the experiences, activities, events, and memories that occur within the campus. American institutions of higher education are giving renewed attention to the question of how the quality and character of place can support the endeavors of the institutions. In doing so, campus communities are seeking to reclaim ground that was lost in the decades after World War II, when the traditional virtues of campus coherence, human scale, and place distinction were overtaken by explosive growth in attendance rates and the growing prevalence of automobiles. American Places calls for campuses to be conceived, not only to heighten the quality of the learning experience, but also as working demonstrations of how places everywhere can be transformed into more healthy, humane, civic environments. As campuses and communities are reshaped by societal forces, the campus will endure as a vital civil learning environment well into the 21st century.

M. PERRY CHAPMAN is a professional planner and principal at Sasaki Associates, Inc., where he specializes in college campus design. He also directed the firm's environmental plans for the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. He has lectured at several colleges, presented numerous conference papers, and has written articles on campus design for journals and publications such as Architecture and the Architectural Record Review. He was a finalist in the 1982 Mitchell Prize international competition for essays on the sustainable society and a 1984 Practitioner Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, MA.