University Trends: Contemporary Campus Design

The campus has a deep-rooted prestige as a place of teaching, learning and nurturing. Conjuring images of cloistered quadrangles, of sunny lawns, of wood-panelled libraries, it is a word viscerally charged with centuries of scholarly tradition. And yet it is also a place of cutting-edge science, vibrancy and energy. It is this dual nature, this concurrent adherence to tradition and innovation, which renders the physical environment of the university such a redolent, enduring and dynamic realm. However, it also means that the twenty-first-century campus is a highly challenging and exacting 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, growing societal expectations and the broadening 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: Contemporary Campus Design introduces the most significant, widespread, and thought-provoking trends that are currently shaping the planning and architecture of higher education institutions across the world. Within this completely revised third edition, Part One identifies current patterns such as student hubs, large-scale expansions and buildings for innovation and interdisciplinary research. Part Two profiles these through recent, well-illustrated, global case studies. This is the essential guide to current and future trends in campus design.

Jonathan Coulson and Paul Roberts are Directors of Turnberry Consulting, a development strategy consultancy created to help landowners to develop real estate projects driven by quality and functionality. They have extensive experience working within the university sector, preparing and delivering development proposals and master-planning initiatives. Isabelle Taylor has co-authored several published books and articles on the subject of campus design, examining both the historical development of the field and current trends within it.

The three have jointly authored University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection (2015), a historical survey of the architecture of universities from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.