CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY: Moore Ruble Yudell Architecture & Planning
by Oscar Riera Ojeda, with James Mary O’Connor and Wendy Kohn
Rockport Press
”Building Ideals”
by Wendy Kohn
For many today, thinking about the architecture of community would begin with the conceptual structure of the World Wide Web. Our fastest-growing communities are immaterial, and the most vital discussion of architecture tend to regard the “architects” of new computer software or foreign policy agreement. Indeed, these new meanings for two old words are thrilling. Who would not want to “build” ideas with architectural elegance and tectonic structure? Who is not fascinated by what is effectively magic: the ability to take part in a virtual twenty-four-hour global community—unencumbered by our bodies and their organic requirements?
But while we continue to invent ever more sophisticated ways of countering nature’s constraints, the cries for “lost community” in our cities and suburbs are getting louder. And as new buildings rarely achieve the power to symbolize and inspire today’s society, architects debate whether there remains any role for their profession at all—publishing books with such titles as Digital City, De-Architecture, and not rhetorically, The End of Architecture?
Such responses to today’s actual conditions are not only appropriate, but in fact, they are deeply reassuring. They remind us that the immediacy of human contact cannot be replaced by machines, however powerful. They attest that true community still requires real places to take root. And they suggest that if architects are listening, an urgent call for their services is to be heard.
Taking up the challenge to rejoin the concept of “community” with architectural shape and form requires that we use all the tools of analysis, design, and precedent available to us. In the United States, we find a unique resource for this work: the American college campus. Founded originally to exist aside from daily public life, American campuses constitute places in which that elusive quality of community has been protected and sustained. And yet, educational ideals aside, university campuses remain inescapably part of the “real” world. Subject to constrained budgets and conflicting interest groups; entrenched leaders and shifting populations; antagonistic neighbors and struggles to maintain identity-as well as the familiar stresses of present urgency challenging prudent planning-campuses share real-world constraints with towns and cities that we currently recognize as communities destroyed.
The pages that follow present the work of Moore Ruble Yudell, architects who have long believed in the power of architecture to foster human interaction. With international experience in balancing the exigencies of the “real” world with the opportunity to give shape to philosophical ideals, Moore Ruble Yudell has designed numerous campus building, cultural institutions, and new communities that remain equally sensitive to the people and buildings inside and outside the perimeter of their sites.
This volume focuses on the inhabitation of real places: at the urban and campus scale; at the site and building scale; at the scale of a single individual in the embrace of a community. Architects, writers, historians, campus planners, clients, and colleagues construct a context for this inquiry into the nature of campus communities today, and discuss as case studies planning and building projects on some of the oldest and most well-known campuses in the United States. Finally, in their essays and an interview, partners John Ruble and Buzz Yudell describe their own understanding of designing places deeply connected to society, which are rich in invention but respectful of history, and focused intensely upon the very subtle but very urgent goal of building vital, durable communities.
—Wendy Kohn
by Oscar Riera Ojeda, with James Mary O’Connor and Wendy Kohn
Rockport Press
”Building Ideals”
by Wendy Kohn
For many today, thinking about the architecture of community would begin with the conceptual structure of the World Wide Web. Our fastest-growing communities are immaterial, and the most vital discussion of architecture tend to regard the “architects” of new computer software or foreign policy agreement. Indeed, these new meanings for two old words are thrilling. Who would not want to “build” ideas with architectural elegance and tectonic structure? Who is not fascinated by what is effectively magic: the ability to take part in a virtual twenty-four-hour global community—unencumbered by our bodies and their organic requirements?
But while we continue to invent ever more sophisticated ways of countering nature’s constraints, the cries for “lost community” in our cities and suburbs are getting louder. And as new buildings rarely achieve the power to symbolize and inspire today’s society, architects debate whether there remains any role for their profession at all—publishing books with such titles as Digital City, De-Architecture, and not rhetorically, The End of Architecture?
Such responses to today’s actual conditions are not only appropriate, but in fact, they are deeply reassuring. They remind us that the immediacy of human contact cannot be replaced by machines, however powerful. They attest that true community still requires real places to take root. And they suggest that if architects are listening, an urgent call for their services is to be heard.
Taking up the challenge to rejoin the concept of “community” with architectural shape and form requires that we use all the tools of analysis, design, and precedent available to us. In the United States, we find a unique resource for this work: the American college campus. Founded originally to exist aside from daily public life, American campuses constitute places in which that elusive quality of community has been protected and sustained. And yet, educational ideals aside, university campuses remain inescapably part of the “real” world. Subject to constrained budgets and conflicting interest groups; entrenched leaders and shifting populations; antagonistic neighbors and struggles to maintain identity-as well as the familiar stresses of present urgency challenging prudent planning-campuses share real-world constraints with towns and cities that we currently recognize as communities destroyed.
The pages that follow present the work of Moore Ruble Yudell, architects who have long believed in the power of architecture to foster human interaction. With international experience in balancing the exigencies of the “real” world with the opportunity to give shape to philosophical ideals, Moore Ruble Yudell has designed numerous campus building, cultural institutions, and new communities that remain equally sensitive to the people and buildings inside and outside the perimeter of their sites.
This volume focuses on the inhabitation of real places: at the urban and campus scale; at the site and building scale; at the scale of a single individual in the embrace of a community. Architects, writers, historians, campus planners, clients, and colleagues construct a context for this inquiry into the nature of campus communities today, and discuss as case studies planning and building projects on some of the oldest and most well-known campuses in the United States. Finally, in their essays and an interview, partners John Ruble and Buzz Yudell describe their own understanding of designing places deeply connected to society, which are rich in invention but respectful of history, and focused intensely upon the very subtle but very urgent goal of building vital, durable communities.
—Wendy Kohn