The Built and (re)Imagined Academy

This paper explores the expectations - pedagogical, political, cultural and economic - that are brought to the contemporary design of a built campus environment, and the implications for understandings of the status of the modern academic. This comes at a time when the campus is increasingly a ‘virtual’ experience. The form and materiality of the built campus may impact upon both how an educational institution relates to its social context and the social dynamics amongst members of the campus community. It mediates, enables and inhibits relationships between academics, students, and other stakeholders. Campus architecture often is a communicative act: it embodies, spatially and materially, imaginings of institutional mission and character, of its relationship to a history of higher education practices, to a particular place and time, and and idealised future-oriented role. The medieval model of the university, in which academics lived a cloistered and reflective life in close proximity to a small community of students, had a significant ideational impact upon both campus design in subsequent eras and cultures of higher education practice. The university turned in upon itself, and affirmed - through its built form as well its practices and rituals - a determination to inculcate and uphold a particularistic community identity even while ostensibly in the service of universalistic knowledge creation and dissemination. The university eschewed external scrutiny and interference, recruited in its own image, and graduates typically served elite roles. The second half of the twentieth century saw two profound developments in higher education: ‘massification’ of student participation, requiring new organisational and spatial forms, and the development of the comprehensive research university. University campuses, took on significant varieties of built form; patterned by these changing functional imperatives, and by the evolution of architectural practice and philosophy, through modernism, postmodernism and beyond. Architecture offered pedagogical promise, but was compromised often by the dictates of financial constraints. Meanwhile public policy-makers, especially city planners, have increasingly looked to the higher education campus as a potential catalyst of urban and economic revival, and urge a spatiality and other built properties thought to be conducive to that. The material fabric of public buildings may be imbued with profound political significance; as strongly revealed in the design decisions for the Berlin of post-reunification Germany when glass was imbued with political associations of transparency and accountability,. The latter part of this paper explores the issues via a case study of the new Bezalel Academy campus project in central Jerusalem. Its proposed materiality and form has explicit rationales to catalyse positive pedagogical change in the institution, and in how it relates to the surrounding city and its inhabitants. In overturning a century-old planning mandate to build in Jerusalem stone, in favour of revealing and fragile glass, in a city notorious for its contentions, divisions and defensiveness, the architects have made both campus design and academic work political. (Panel option: ‘Transformation of the Political Studies Profession - What does it mean to be an Active Academic in the Current Era?’, Meng-Hsuan Chou and Jacqui Briggs.?)