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Literature has a distinct architecture and an evocative landscape. From Steinbeck’s California to Dickens’ London, from Poe’s house of Usher to Conrad’s riverside huts, literary spaces invite us to experience them as imagined by the authors and experienced by the characters. As students—of literature or other subjects—we receive another invitation: to enter universities, commonly characterized as “ivory towers” or “cathedrals of learning,” and allow our experiences to be shaped by a different group of structures and landscapes. At universities, we are asked to engage in intellectual work—producing new knowledge, generating new solutions to old (and new) problems. And, as Virginia Woolf reminds us in A Room of One’s Own, the spaces designated for such work should be commensurate with the quality and significance of the work itself.
In February 2005, President Richard L. McCormick called on members of the Rutgers community to meet the challenge of aligning our intellectual values with our physical circumstances. Issuing a new “vision” for the College Avenue campus, he invited the university community to begin a conversation about his proposal. In addition to creating a Steering Committee from the upper ranks of university leadership, he invited Rutgers English Professor Richard E. Miller to lead a Campus Advisory Committee made up of students, faculty, administrators, and staff.
From the start, Miller recognized that, with the exception of faculty who specialize in planning or architecture, most committee members would be unfamiliar with the issues at stake in the project. Consequently, he structured the committee’s meetings that summer as a series of seminars. At the end of the summer, the Campus Advisory Committee provided feedback to the Steering Committee, offering information about the architects who had accepted Rutgers’ invitation to apply and strategies for engaging the university and New Brunswick communities in the design competition.
From the winnowing process that began that summer, five teams were selected to offer plans for the College Avenue campus. From December 2005 to March 2006, these teams immersed themselves in Rutgers culture to generate plans according to the university’s needs. However, the university’s budget crisis delayed the display of the designs. The Bank of America, enthused about the plan to transform the campus, donated $1 million to Rutgers in June. Now able to complete the competition, the university unveiled the designs at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in September.
Though the teams offered drastically different interpretations of the aesthetic direction Rutgers should take, their plans had some common themes, including the need to reconnect the campus with the Raritan River. The team of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, and Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, proposed a “Great Lounge” on the riverside; Eisenman Architects, working with Field Operations, offered a horizontal tower that stretched to the river; Antoine Predock and the Olin Partnership sought to place riverfront dining on the Raritan, in addition to linking Old Queen’s with “New Queen’s” by way of a riverside “Bow”; Morphosis-Thom Mayne and Hargreaves Associates planted a floating island on the river, as well as an amphitheater on the banks; TEN Arquitectos–Enrique Norten and Wallace Roberts & Todd placed their Arts and Sciences tower on the riverbank as well, extending a sloping park to the river’s edge.
Mixed responses greeted the plans, and no clear front-runner emerged during the museum display. While the teams shared similar goals—to incorporate green space into the fabric of the campus, bring the river closer to campus, and improve the transportation situation—they all imagined radically different embellishments for the campus. Beyer Blinder Belle and Jean Nouvel proposed a “MiniMetro” connectivity system, as well as a range of outdoor improvements across the campuses. Cook and Douglass would feature open air meeting rooms, College Avenue residents would be able to engage their environment through “free expression walls,” and Busch students could lounge on outdoor carpets and enjoy electronic screens. Peter Eisenman’s team also embraced the idea of outdoor rooms as a way to encourage social interaction, integrating better-defined courtyards into the campus. Predock and Olin expressed their consideration for the outdoors differently, emphasizing environmental stewardship and sustainability in their plan. In addition to an amphitheater on Voorhees Mall, the Predock team incorporated water prominently into their vision by proposing a created tributary and a series of reflecting pools where Scott Hall now stands. Finally, of all the teams, Morphosis-Thom Mayne seemed to focus the most on the overall flow of buildings across campus, offering various phasing options to bring about gradual but substantial change in orienting how people would move across campus.
A series of public symposia (modeled on Professor Miller’s summer seminars) culminated in a public forum at which the teams presented their plans to the whole community. The TEN Arquitectos-Enrique Norten team distinguished itself from the other teams with the compelling description of its vision, and President McCormick ultimately designated it the winner of the competition. The team, whose designs appear above, proposed a crystalline cylindrical Arts and Sciences Tower astride an east-west Raritan Mall. The Mall slopes to the river, serving as a bridge over George Street and providing room for subterranean parking—both of which are means of alleviating traffic problems, along with the proposed bus rapid-transit system.
The president emphasized that Rutgers is “not selecting every detail” of the winning proposal but rather entering into a “partnership” with the team that best understands the university’s wishes and needs. As a writing teacher, Miller affirms this approach, because “you always throw the first draft away, and you start over.” Despite the president’s insistence that Rutgers has chosen a partner without committing to a plan, some are highly critical of what they have seen so far. An alumni group called Rutgers 20/20 (collaborating with Rutgers English Professor William C. Dowling) rallied in defense of “the graceful Georgian lines and Palladian proportions” that characterize colonial university architecture. Yet, arguing from her vantage as an architectural historian and chair of the jury that voted on the plans, Carla Yanni believes that “the next academic building ought to be—and will be—a model of an academic building for the twenty-first century.”
Whether the Rutgers administration follows through on the winning team’s suggestions or jettisons them in favor of a more traditional course remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the university’s diverse architectural history confirms Professor Yanni’s belief that “you can do great intellectual work in a wide variety of settings.” Through his participation in the design competition, Professor Miller has come to believe that redesigning the campus is, ultimately, part of the university’s commitment to promoting great intellectual work. “The quality of the space where you work,” he points out, “has a direct influence on the quality of the work you produce in that space.” Consequently, a university must provide its students with a campus that promotes “sustained educational development.” Having started this conversation, Rutgers University is that much closer to creating a physical environment worthy of the intellectual work already taking place on campus.
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