Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Annie Pfeiffer Chapel in Florida. Image © Josh Hallett

是时候模糊城市和大学之间的界限了
It’s Time to Blur the Boundaries Between Town and Gown

由专筑网王沛儒，小R编译

我住在伦敦，那里有 23 所大学，这些大学的在校生人数接近 50 万。在一个拥有近 1000 万居民的城市中，5% 听起来是一个很小的比例，但却是一个相当可观的数字，大约相当于亚特兰大的人口数量。如果城市规模缩小，这个比例就会上升。在我们隔壁城市牛津（人口 15 万），40% 的人口是在校生；在剑桥（人口 12.5 万），比例大概是 33%。在这些地方，校园和城市紧密地交织在一起，二者的规划息息相关。

许多美国大学在创建之初，都是从牛津、剑桥大学的城市形态中汲取灵感。这在四合院和新哥特式建筑中都有所体现，但在新建筑的表现形式上却出现了一种创新：大学是独立的场所。可能是翻译的问题，因为牛津、剑桥，并不存在校园的说法。这些大学分布广泛，但其中许多学院都与城市隔绝。无论是 14 世纪还是 20 世纪的设计（参见牛津大学圣凯瑟琳学院或剑桥大学菲茨威廉学院的现代主义重新诠释），它们的学院系统都形成了错落有致的形态，但每所学院都属于整体，这些大学分布在其所在的城市。

在牛津，有拉德克利夫区和伯德雷恩区，这是牛津大学的历史中心，当地人、游客和大学都聚集在这里。在城市的其他地区，有较新的拉德克里夫天文台区和牛津科学区；学院、院系和研究所遍布全城。Osney Mead和Begbroke正在规划两个创新/科学园区，它们相距三英里。牛津大学自身是城市塑造者，最近成立了牛津大学发展公司，这是一家合资企业，正在开发这两个校区，还投资改善了城市的基础设施。剑桥也采用了类似的模式，由大学建设新的城市扩展区，目的是为了增加欧洲热门的房地产市场的住房供应。

因此，这些大学城形成于几个世纪的发展，这会是美国大学的未来空间吗？

俯瞰罗德岛普罗维登斯，布朗大学的身影从城市的轮廓中显现出来。1770 年，布朗大学搬迁到了现在的位置--学院山上一座占地 8 英亩的庄园，这个庄园归布朗家族所有，这是布朗大学的主要赞助方。在 19 世纪和 20 世纪期间，布朗大学围绕着一个中心广场逐步发展，将城镇和校舍错综复杂地交织在一起，形成了今天的学院山社区。

普罗维登斯是美国古老的城市，与牛津剑桥一样，布朗大学的大部分建筑在汽车出现之前就已经建好了。因此，学院建筑和非学院建筑之间的距离比较近。建筑占地面积比许多新建大学都要小。这为大学边界线与城市边界线之间、公共生活与学术生活之间的毗邻和互动提供了许多机会。

In London, where I live, there are 23 universities. Those universities make up an institutional population of nearly half a million people. In a city with almost 10 million residents, 5% may seem a small number, but it’s a significant one, roughly the population of Atlanta. Shrink the city, and the proportion can increase dramatically. In our neighbouring cities of Oxford (population 150,000), 40% of the population is institutional; in Cambridge (population 125,000), it’s 33%. Campus and city are so intertwined in those places that a plan for one is almost necessarily a plan for the other.
In their origins, many American universities looked to Oxbridge for inspiration in their urban form. It’s seen in the ubiquitous quadrangles and neo-gothic architecture, but in its New World manifestation came an innovation: the campus as a standalone place. Something became lost in the translation, because at Oxford or Cambridge, there is no campus per se. The universities are diffuse; however, many of their college precincts are closed off from the city. Their collegiate systems result in a patchwork of cloistered domains, whether designed in the 14th century or the 20th century (look to St Catherine’s College, Oxford, or Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for modernist reinterpretations), but each is a piece of a greater whole.
In Oxford, there’s the Radcliffe Camera and Bodleian quarter, the historic heart of the university where locals, tourists, and university co-mingle. In other parts of the city, there are the newer Radcliffe Observatory Quarter and Oxford Science Area; colleges, faculties, departments, and institutes are dotted around town. Two innovation/science campuses are being planned at Osney Mead and Begbroke. They’re three miles apart. Recognizing its role as a shaper of the city, the university has recently set up Oxford University Development, a joint venture that is developing both sites and making investments in improving the city’s infrastructure. Cambridge follows a similar pattern, with the university building new urban extensions that aim to increase housing supply in what is one of Europe’s hottest property markets.

So, these are university cities that emerged through an organic process over centuries. Might this be the spatial future for the American university?
Look above Providence, Rhode Island, and Brown University’s figure ground appears from the grain of the city. In 1770, the college moved to its current location, an 8-acre estate on College Hill, owned by the Brown family, its principal benefactors. It grew incrementally around a central quad during the 19th and 20th centuries, weaving town and gown intricately together, creating today’s College Hill neighbourhood.
Providence is one of the oldest cities in America, and, like Oxbridge, much of Brown predates the automobile. The result is that college and non-college buildings are closer together. Building footprints are smaller than in many newer universities. This presents many micro-opportunities for adjacencies and interactions between the university’s boundary line and the city’s, between public and academic life.


Brown University. Image © Daniel Elsea

围墙围起来的校园有意义吗？还是说，像布朗大学这样的大学将成为城市中的开放区域？确定模式非常重要，因为这两种规划类型截然不同。校园规划优先考虑内部的秩序和可辨识性，还要强调边缘的界定；然而，更合适的还得是邻里规划，它更加寻求以非正式的渐进式城市设计和软化的边缘向外延伸。许多城市大学本质就是社区。

并不是每所校园都在城市，事实上，美国的许多校园都在小镇上。就拿我读本科的威廉姆斯学院来说吧。威廉姆斯学院典型地反映了美国人喜欢把学院建在小镇而非城市的倾向。“小镇”基本上就是一条街道和几个街区的典雅的住宅，与田园风光融为一体。介于两者之间的区域就是“城镇”。威廉姆斯建于 18 世纪末，逐渐修建了大量的房产，向原始地貌延伸。如今，在全镇 2,176 英亩的土地中，威廉姆斯占了 450 多英亩。虽然学院规模相对较小（出于选择），但却是方圆数英里内最大的机构。这表明，土地管理是学院规划的核心责任。尽管威廉姆斯学院与世隔绝，但其梭罗式的环境却很有欺骗性，它并不孤独，坐落在生物群落和栖息地之间，自然和文化景观需要精心呵护和尊重。这就要求在建筑设计时需要采取温和的方式。

Does a walled-off campus make sense? Or, instead, is a university like Brown an open and porous citizen of the city? Deciding which is the case is important, because the two need very different types of plans. A campus plan prioritizes the order and legibility within and places emphasis on defining edges; yet what might be more appropriate is a neighborhood plan, which seeks to reach out with a more informal and incremental urban design and softened edges. Many urban universities are effectively neighborhoods.
Not every campus is urban; indeed, many American ones are in small towns. Take Williams College, where I was an undergraduate. Williams typifies an American preference for locating colleges on the frontier rather than in cities. “Town” is pretty much one street and a few blocks of genteel houses that blend into a bucolic landscape. Everything else in between is “gown.” Williams, founded in the late 18th century, gradually accumulated a large number of properties sprawling out into the virgin landscape. Today, it holds over 450 acres of the town’s total of 2,176. It may be a relatively small institution (by choice), but the college is the biggest player for miles and miles. This suggests a responsibility for land stewardship at the heart of college planning. Despite the splendid isolation, Williams’ Thoreau-esque setting is deceiving. It is not alone. It is set amid biomes and habitats, a natural and cultural landscape that demands care and deference. This suggests a gentle approach to building design.


Williams College. Image © Daniel Elsea

美国最美的文化建筑就是最好的例证，安藤忠雄设计的克拉克艺术学院扩建工程是隶属于这个学院的教学博物馆，它坐落在伯克郡的风景中。宽敞的内部空间可以向外眺望伯克郡的群山，里德-希尔德布兰德（Reed Hilderbrand）设计的人造景观与周围的自然景观融为一体，安藤的建筑也随之融入其中，甚至还柔化了周围笨重的建筑--20 世纪 50 年代的美学艺术建筑和 20 世纪 70 年代协和建筑事务所（The Architects Collaborative）设计的粗野主义建筑，给人的感觉更像是波士顿而不是伯克郡。建筑师 SO-IL 最近公布的为威廉姆斯学院艺术博物馆所做的设计也采用了类似的景观主导方法。在这种情况下，校园不是由建筑和草坪的简单组成，而是将建筑与自然融为一体。

洛克菲勒大学坐落在曼哈顿上东区的东河畔，它的地理位置与克拉克艺术学院截然不同。这座 20 世纪的校园与周围的城市通过围墙隔开，从规划和风格上看，更像是一所中世纪的牛津剑桥大学。这所大学只能往上走，别无他法。在第一大道（First Avenue）和富兰克林-罗斯福大道（Franklin D Roosevelt Drive）之间的第 62 街和第 72 街之间，有一个广阔的医疗社区，占地覆盖了 20 多个连续的街区，其中包括多家专注于医学研究和实践以及生物医学研究的全球性机构：洛克菲勒大学特别外科医院（Rockefeller University Hospital for Special Surgery）、纽约长老会医院（New York-Presbyterian Hospital）、威尔康奈尔医学中心（Weill Cornell Medical Center）、威尔康奈尔医学院（Weill Cornell Medical College）和斯隆凯特琳癌症纪念中心（Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center），这就是严肃的科学力量。

One of the most beautiful cultural buildings in the U.S. exemplifies this. Tadao Ando’s expansion of the Clark Art Institute, a teaching museum attached to the college, is set in its Berkshire landscape in such a way that it almost disappears. Generous internal spaces look out into the Berkshire hills, with a manmade landscape by Reed Hilderbrand blending into the surrounding nature, and by extension Ando’s building, while even softening its clunkier neighbours—a 1950s Beaux Arts folly and 1970s brutalist hunk by The Architects Collaborative, which feels more Bostonian than Berkshires. The recently unveiled design by architects SO–IL for the Williams College Museum of Art adopts a similarly landscape-led approach. What’s happening in this case is less a campus of formal buildings and lawns and more an approach of nestling buildings into nature.
In a vastly different setting, Rockefeller University occupies a compact citadel on the East River in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Walled off from the city around it, this 20th century campus is more like a Medieval Oxbridge college in plan and demeanour. The university can’t really go anywhere but up, and it has. But cross the street and check out its immediate neighbours. There is a wider medical community that runs between 62nd and 72nd, between First Avenue and Franklin D Roosevelt Drive, covering over 20 contiguous blocks that includes several global institutions dedicated to the study and practice of medicine and biomedical research: the Rockefeller University Hospital for Special Surgery, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical Center, Weill Cornell Medical College, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. That’s serious scientific power.


The Rockefeller University. Image © Daniel Elsea

因此，乍一看，这似乎是一个独立的区域，实际上这是整个城市知识生态系统。然而，洛克菲勒最初的园区以约克大道和东河为界（利用了罗斯福大道的使用权），占据了第 63 街和第 68 街之间的五个街区。校园三面完全封闭，只有东 66 街的一个主入口可以进入，如果说多孔性的条件是什么，那就是它了，这些医疗机构的邻居们必然有着许多相同的空间要求和期望。

作为天然的创新摇篮，美国的大学可能是开启可持续城市的钥匙。马萨诸塞州剑桥市比任何美国城市都更能体现这种可能性。这里有着庞大的大学机构--我们可以称之为“MITHarvard”--占据了城市的两端，但随着两所大学的扩建，也在逐渐靠拢。两所大学的在校生占剑桥总人口的三分之一。

So what at first glance seems a standalone place is actually part of an incidental urban knowledge ecosystem. Yet Rockefeller’s original campus is bounded by York Avenue and the East River (utilizing air rights over the FDR Drive), occupying five blocks between 63rd and 68th. It is completely enclosed on three sides, accessed by a single main entrance on East 66th Street. If there ever was a condition for porosity, this would be it. These medical neighbors are bound to share many of the same spatial requirements and ambitions.
The natural cradles of innovation, America’s universities might be the key to unlocking more sustainable cities. Cambridge, Massachusetts, exemplifies this possibility more so than any American city. Here there is a vast university apparatus—we can call it MITHarvard—that occupies two ends of the city but that gradually is coming closer together as both universities have expanded. The institutional population of the two universities comprises a third of the total population of Cambridge.


MITHarvard. Image © Daniel Elsea

哈佛一直在“规划”，也侧面反映了他们管理方式的分散性。如今，哈佛大学的校区已经越过查尔斯河，扩展到波士顿本土了。然而，最近我惊奇地发现，麻省理工学院从未遵循过校园规划，也不想进行校园规划。麻省理工学院给我的感觉是，这样的规划会限制其校园的发展。

麻省理工学院和哈佛大学，就像牛津大学和剑桥大学一样，享有一种共生关系，为他们的城市带来社会、文化和经济效益，反之亦然。如果大学与城市合作，为剑桥的可持续城市发展塑造更全面的框架，会怎样呢？以这种方式扩大规模可以很好地处理一系列问题，从住房可负担性到容纳初创企业，到投资公共交通，再到推动气候适应性的发展。

Reflecting the decentralized nature of how it is governed, Harvard is always “planning.” Harvard’s holdings today have now sprawled across the Charles River into Boston proper. Yet I was struck to learn recently that MIT has never followed a campus plan, nor does it want one. The feeling being such a plan would constrain its opportunistic approach to campus growth.
MIT and Harvard, like Oxford and Cambridge, enjoy a symbiotic relationship, bringing social, cultural, and economic benefits to their city, and vice-versa. What if the universities teamed up with the city to shape a more comprehensive framework for Cambridge’s sustainable urban development? Scaling up in this way could deliver real benefits to a host of issues, from housing affordability to accommodating startup businesses to making investments in mass transit to pushing the boundary on climate resilience.


Brown University. Image © Daniel Elsea

一个强大的城市为一所大学的成功提供了关键因素。无论是对人才的吸引力、学生的安全，还是提升院校品牌和丰富多样性。在校园之外，在城市中零散的建筑群与城市本身的整体体验之间，是否可以找到大学的身份认同？城市即大学，大学即城市？也许是时候让我们所熟知的校园规划退出历史舞台了。取而代之的应该是一种更加外向型的规划，在这种规划中，与大学环境相关的往往是更为重要和复杂的问题，除此之外，大学内部的规划也同样重要。

美国大学可以成为促进城市规划进步的有力工具。在它们所在的地方，通常没有其他单一的土地所有者可以在当地发展中扮演如此具有变革性的角色。作为场所缔造者，它们拥有得天独厚的优势。也许是时候让校园回归大学最初的愿景了：它属于城市，二者的边界逐步模糊。

A strong city provides a university with key ingredients for success. Whether it’s attractiveness to talent or student safety or boosting institutional brand and enriching diversity. Might university identity be found beyond the campus, in a territory somewhere between a scattered collection of buildings within a city and a whole experience of the city itself? The city as the university, and the university as the city? Maybe it’s time to retire the campus plan as we have known it. In its place should be a more outward-looking type of plan where the often much more significant and complex issues pertaining to the university’s context are given just as much importance as to what has carefully been planned within.
American universities could be powerful instruments for progressive urban planning. Where they are situated, there usually is no other single landowner primed to play such a transformative role in local development. They occupy a uniquely privileged role as placemakers. Perhaps then it’s time to return the campus to the original vision of the university: as part of the polis, where its boundaries are blurred.