he COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated long-emergent changes to post-secondary education and therefore, campus design. “Band-aid education” has amplified deficiencies and strengths in pedagogy and forced institutions to reevaluate systems of learning, compelling a deeper reckoning on the purpose of higher education. As an architect with almost 25 years of experience in campus design, I synthesized research insights from 50+ faculty, students and staff at 40+ campuses in fifteen countries to propose that future-focused campuses must embrace fluid learning and social continuums, expanding their built environments beyond traditional forms and boundaries.
The Evolving Whole Campus Experience
Simultaneous, divergent forces are causing the campus to undergo rapid evolution as hybridity persists and serendipity and nuance in campus life is evaporating. Beyond reconciling variants of hybrid education, academic life has synergies with collaborative and social spaces like libraries, offices, gymnasia, cafeterias, student centers and residences, which cannot remain agnostic to prevailing changes. Despite plans for student life facilities already under the microscope, it is unlikely that institutions will abandon the whole-person immersive experiences intrinsic to their identities. Rather, these places will flex in scale or strategically merge with their broader communities to develop greater connectivity and civic relevance.
Innovative research-oriented campuses will grow industry partnerships like those at Audi Institute-TU Munich and Microsoft-Cisco-Intel-University of Melbourne which directly impact learning. Already, technology corporations in India and China operate “universities” with 21st century skills training, Silicon Valley provides access to “Stanford-Online”, and even Walmart proffers education benefits aligned with lifelong learning goals. Similarly, universities are refocusing their curricula from holistic knowledge creation to job-preparedness, which has already impacted planning and design. Entrepreneurial maker spaces encouraging experimentation while mimicking WeWork are now de-rigueur in new academic buildings. Time will tell if these industry-integrated spaces proliferate, or get co-opted by corporate campuses, i.e. the “MIT lab at CISCO”, rather than the “CISCO lab at MIT”.
Once the armature of campus life gets redistributed to their communities, what experiences and spaces will be deemed essential and core to the campus? Radical modifications in academic models are being debated as even elite institutions re-examine their fundamental mandates, and the promise of mass education to effect social advancement is questioned. As campuses reconsider hybrid returns, the ubiquitous shift to remote learning has upended the pedagogical foundations of didactic and experiential learning to catalyze new forms of knowledge creation and socialization. The following speculations reshape the campus community and its architecture:
Campus beyond departments: While department-based structures are likely to endure, decreasing budgets and increasing costs demand a reexamination of facilities’ utilization to amplify synergies for interdisciplinarity and efficiency. Smaller campuses will lead the charge to delink departments from space allocations and re-envision the built environment as an amalgam of intersecting typologies – scalable classrooms, labs, lecture halls, studios, and reinvented social spaces.
Hybridity: Despite significant disruption, hybridity will expand; collaborative, student-focused programs and Netflix/Khan-Academy-inspired models exploring informal and formal partnerships will bolster personalized learning, peer-to-peer learning, specialized tutoring and allied research, potentially redefining the internationalization of education.
Auditing Real estate: Offices will see immediate impact echoing corporate trends - as courses shift online permanently and work-from-home/hoteling retain favor, the organization of unique faculty buildings may be reexamined, and support spaces may shrink or be repurposed. Student housing may move to off-campus providers, with limited on-campus “hostels.”
Rethinking “Burolandschaft” (Office Landscape): Campuses may reinterpret this Workplace and Open Schools concept - reductively described as “(noisy) schools without walls”—to shape shared, central forums for a multiplicity of experience using adaptive infrastructure. Adopting generative design will enable iterative scenario planning for scalable manifestations of programs, activities, and circulation. Combined with sustainability-oriented intelligent building systems, this concept will imbibe the ebbs and flows of habitation.
Threshold Campus: Universities are likely to embrace a more porous, synergistic indoor-outdoor relationship in their campuses. This would involve harnessing the untapped potential of in-between spaces and extending the learning continuum while enhancing the overall student experience and supporting holistic sustainability.
Education Ecosystem: Like vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods, campuses constructed as mosaics of colleges or quads with intersecting typologies uphold community better than those with differentiated zones for academics, residences, and student life. By actively generating a fluid seam interpolating campus and community, interconnected networks enabling cross-pollination with libraries, museums, community centers, schools and urban parks can be operationalized.
Radical Transformation Has Already Begun
Prior to the current crisis, MIT’s Media Lab was building a credentialing platform aimed at allowing refugees to carry “digital credentials wallets” as they crossed geographies and gathered skills. This builds upon existing trends related to personalized learning/un-learning/re-learning, where, having gained a secondary school foundation, an individual’s future could include project-based explorations and interest/expertise-based learning, defying traditional university degree programs or single-institution boundaries.
As radical as such remaking appears, it is inherent to the debate as campuses evaluate their long-term relevance and structures. Constant experimentation and residing in a “permanent beta state” may become the mindset of students, faculty, and even institutions. To develop academic and fiscal resilience, institutions are challenged to actively plan to adapt, harness curiosity and take intelligent risks without fear of failure as they embrace a state of living in vulnerability (affording more growth than years of relative stability). Ironically, this is just the kind of advice that new graduates often receive.
At a time of profound change, a foundation of predictable 4-year degree programs returns to the center of debate. We have long acknowledged that post-secondary education is preparing graduates for unknown futures by imparting a growth mindset, critical thinking skills, and creative risk taking. Still, the old order of university degrees as socio-cultural currency framing life persists, despite the fact that most graduates will “pivot” their professional identities multiple times. While aiming not to commodify education, models for career redefinition emerge - multi-year university “subscriptions”, competency-based learning, and “unbundling of traditional programs” by elite institutions to grow access. Similarly, Denmark’s government-supported retraining program allows the work-force to re-skill every four years, and Stanford’s ‘Open Loop University’ promises six years of learning over a lifetime for recurring knowledge acquisition; and beyond singular entities, innovation clusters spanning universities and partners are shaping permeable networks of learning and research based upon the shared interests of their participants - wider application of such models will dramatically change the physical campus. The post-secondary landscape is indeed ripe for transformation.
At this point of global inflection ambitious ideas are imperative and may hasten to broader fruition. The notion of design creating stable, 50-year spaces responsive to specific anticipated needs has already shifted due to changes in education over the past decade. Forward-looking schools are reimagining campuses as a series of agile, multifunctional spaces with robust, scalable, flexible, tech-enabled infrastructure which can be refashioned to support sequential or disruptive programmatic changes and new alliances. This will now expand to include variation in occupancy and habitation based on public health and big-weather events. Soon this conceptual approach will not be unconventional enough to proclaim itself the “campus of the future”; possible futures assumed to be 10-15 years away are here now and becoming the new normal.
a global affairs media network
The Post-Pandemic College Campus
September 28, 2020
T
he COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated long-emergent changes to post-secondary education and therefore, campus design. “Band-aid education” has amplified deficiencies and strengths in pedagogy and forced institutions to reevaluate systems of learning, compelling a deeper reckoning on the purpose of higher education. As an architect with almost 25 years of experience in campus design, I synthesized research insights from 50+ faculty, students and staff at 40+ campuses in fifteen countries to propose that future-focused campuses must embrace fluid learning and social continuums, expanding their built environments beyond traditional forms and boundaries.
The Evolving Whole Campus Experience
Simultaneous, divergent forces are causing the campus to undergo rapid evolution as hybridity persists and serendipity and nuance in campus life is evaporating. Beyond reconciling variants of hybrid education, academic life has synergies with collaborative and social spaces like libraries, offices, gymnasia, cafeterias, student centers and residences, which cannot remain agnostic to prevailing changes. Despite plans for student life facilities already under the microscope, it is unlikely that institutions will abandon the whole-person immersive experiences intrinsic to their identities. Rather, these places will flex in scale or strategically merge with their broader communities to develop greater connectivity and civic relevance.
Innovative research-oriented campuses will grow industry partnerships like those at Audi Institute-TU Munich and Microsoft-Cisco-Intel-University of Melbourne which directly impact learning. Already, technology corporations in India and China operate “universities” with 21st century skills training, Silicon Valley provides access to “Stanford-Online”, and even Walmart proffers education benefits aligned with lifelong learning goals. Similarly, universities are refocusing their curricula from holistic knowledge creation to job-preparedness, which has already impacted planning and design. Entrepreneurial maker spaces encouraging experimentation while mimicking WeWork are now de-rigueur in new academic buildings. Time will tell if these industry-integrated spaces proliferate, or get co-opted by corporate campuses, i.e. the “MIT lab at CISCO”, rather than the “CISCO lab at MIT”.
Once the armature of campus life gets redistributed to their communities, what experiences and spaces will be deemed essential and core to the campus? Radical modifications in academic models are being debated as even elite institutions re-examine their fundamental mandates, and the promise of mass education to effect social advancement is questioned. As campuses reconsider hybrid returns, the ubiquitous shift to remote learning has upended the pedagogical foundations of didactic and experiential learning to catalyze new forms of knowledge creation and socialization. The following speculations reshape the campus community and its architecture:
Campus beyond departments: While department-based structures are likely to endure, decreasing budgets and increasing costs demand a reexamination of facilities’ utilization to amplify synergies for interdisciplinarity and efficiency. Smaller campuses will lead the charge to delink departments from space allocations and re-envision the built environment as an amalgam of intersecting typologies – scalable classrooms, labs, lecture halls, studios, and reinvented social spaces.
Hybridity: Despite significant disruption, hybridity will expand; collaborative, student-focused programs and Netflix/Khan-Academy-inspired models exploring informal and formal partnerships will bolster personalized learning, peer-to-peer learning, specialized tutoring and allied research, potentially redefining the internationalization of education.
Auditing Real estate: Offices will see immediate impact echoing corporate trends - as courses shift online permanently and work-from-home/hoteling retain favor, the organization of unique faculty buildings may be reexamined, and support spaces may shrink or be repurposed. Student housing may move to off-campus providers, with limited on-campus “hostels.”
Rethinking “Burolandschaft” (Office Landscape): Campuses may reinterpret this Workplace and Open Schools concept - reductively described as “(noisy) schools without walls”—to shape shared, central forums for a multiplicity of experience using adaptive infrastructure. Adopting generative design will enable iterative scenario planning for scalable manifestations of programs, activities, and circulation. Combined with sustainability-oriented intelligent building systems, this concept will imbibe the ebbs and flows of habitation.
Threshold Campus: Universities are likely to embrace a more porous, synergistic indoor-outdoor relationship in their campuses. This would involve harnessing the untapped potential of in-between spaces and extending the learning continuum while enhancing the overall student experience and supporting holistic sustainability.
Education Ecosystem: Like vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods, campuses constructed as mosaics of colleges or quads with intersecting typologies uphold community better than those with differentiated zones for academics, residences, and student life. By actively generating a fluid seam interpolating campus and community, interconnected networks enabling cross-pollination with libraries, museums, community centers, schools and urban parks can be operationalized.
Radical Transformation Has Already Begun
Prior to the current crisis, MIT’s Media Lab was building a credentialing platform aimed at allowing refugees to carry “digital credentials wallets” as they crossed geographies and gathered skills. This builds upon existing trends related to personalized learning/un-learning/re-learning, where, having gained a secondary school foundation, an individual’s future could include project-based explorations and interest/expertise-based learning, defying traditional university degree programs or single-institution boundaries.
As radical as such remaking appears, it is inherent to the debate as campuses evaluate their long-term relevance and structures. Constant experimentation and residing in a “permanent beta state” may become the mindset of students, faculty, and even institutions. To develop academic and fiscal resilience, institutions are challenged to actively plan to adapt, harness curiosity and take intelligent risks without fear of failure as they embrace a state of living in vulnerability (affording more growth than years of relative stability). Ironically, this is just the kind of advice that new graduates often receive.
At a time of profound change, a foundation of predictable 4-year degree programs returns to the center of debate. We have long acknowledged that post-secondary education is preparing graduates for unknown futures by imparting a growth mindset, critical thinking skills, and creative risk taking. Still, the old order of university degrees as socio-cultural currency framing life persists, despite the fact that most graduates will “pivot” their professional identities multiple times. While aiming not to commodify education, models for career redefinition emerge - multi-year university “subscriptions”, competency-based learning, and “unbundling of traditional programs” by elite institutions to grow access. Similarly, Denmark’s government-supported retraining program allows the work-force to re-skill every four years, and Stanford’s ‘Open Loop University’ promises six years of learning over a lifetime for recurring knowledge acquisition; and beyond singular entities, innovation clusters spanning universities and partners are shaping permeable networks of learning and research based upon the shared interests of their participants - wider application of such models will dramatically change the physical campus. The post-secondary landscape is indeed ripe for transformation.
At this point of global inflection ambitious ideas are imperative and may hasten to broader fruition. The notion of design creating stable, 50-year spaces responsive to specific anticipated needs has already shifted due to changes in education over the past decade. Forward-looking schools are reimagining campuses as a series of agile, multifunctional spaces with robust, scalable, flexible, tech-enabled infrastructure which can be refashioned to support sequential or disruptive programmatic changes and new alliances. This will now expand to include variation in occupancy and habitation based on public health and big-weather events. Soon this conceptual approach will not be unconventional enough to proclaim itself the “campus of the future”; possible futures assumed to be 10-15 years away are here now and becoming the new normal.
