"Campus" Presentation Booklet by Phillip Denny

C A M P U S Situating the Global University

PRESENTATION

BOOKLET

Phillip Denny Carnegie Mellon University 2014

Consumer Paradise (Elevation)

Preface

Architecture devotes itself to the reproduction of the material conditions of the status quo. Architecture creates facilities (from Latin, facile, lit. trans: “easily”, that which makes easier), for the processes of the dominant social framework.1 The impossibility of realizing Utopian dreams does not negate Utopia’s conceptual value. The ‘object’ of the project of utopia is not so much a Sisyphean chase after a perfected image-world, but rather the production of a critical mirror.2 All Utopias, —inverted, mirrored reproductions—of immediately apparent every-wheres.3 The global stock of Universities constitutes a vast catalog of unique No-places situated within the context of the late modern everywhere. A landscape of failed Utopias, the history of Universities is colored by a perennial struggle: the essential protection of sacred Ideals from the forces that simultaneously support, and compromise the project of Universitas.4 This irreconcilable Gordian knot is arguably the root of the diversity of processes that the contemporary University now engages. These processes no longer constitute a singular search for Truth, but rather a complex

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Architecture: a medium for the production of Utopias, and the complex process by which they attempt to become material. Much

all scales.

The scenes outlined in Campus interrogate the place of this ubiquitous institution within the complex milieu of late capitalism, and ask: what might happen when Architecture is no longer the tool separation,5 forces of Capital at bay, but rather is poised as an instrument the hyperbolic juxtaposition of simultaneous, competing realities?5 Campus recognizes the absurd realities of the contemporary University as a very real dream, a compromised utopia. It is not merely a critical appraisal of the University; the scenes propose a series of situations that exploit the institution’s late modern reality for the production of new institutional and architectural possibilities. 1 Frampton calls attention to this, one of Architecture’s essential dichotomies, in relation to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the vita activa and Heidegger’s thought on dwelling. See Kenneth Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition” in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architectural Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 358-376. 2 See Chapter 2 “The Utopian Enclave” in Fredric Jameson Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso Books, 2005), and Reinhold Martin, “Utopian Realism” Online. 3 The attempt to realize Utopia might be considered a form of Totalitarianism, See Sheldon Rothblatt, “University as Utopia” in European Research University: An Historical Parenthesis. 4 Universitas is here in reference to the concept of the ‘ideal’ University, a confederation of scholars devoted to the search for “Truth.” See, also, the proceedings of the 1972 MoMA conference, “The Universitas Project,” convened by Emilio Ambasz, which brought together Jean Baudrillard, Octavio Paz, Umberto Eco, Henri Lefebvre, and Hannah Arendt, among others, to debate the foundations of an ideal University. The Universitas Project (New York: MoMA, 2003).

Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

“The Founding of Dartmouth College in 1769.” Engraving by S.E. Brown, 1839, of Eleazer Wheelock with his Anglo-Saxon and Native American students in the frontier of New Hampshire.

Research CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

ACT I

Universitas and the postmodern Metropole Met·ro·pole, n.: The parent state of a colony. Origin: late 15th c.: from Old French metropole, based on Greek meter, metro- ‘mother’ + polis ‘city’

The University is a productive entity at the heart of centerless Empire.1 More than ten thousand universities now dot the the project of Knowledge formation. Today, the University can be found anywhere, all over the world. Whether situated in the metropolis or standing in an idyll, all campuses are enclaves of one sort or another. But before the university took refuge in the Ivory tower it was universitas, a body of faculty and students—an essentially placeless federation.2 Before then, Universitas was a utopian project—a ‘No-place.’ An entity distinctly removed from the political ordering of its context, universitas constituted a space of its students and scholars. Not until the sovereign authority of medieval Bologna gifted a chapel to the scholar’s guild did universitas become university, campus.3 Within the context of late capitalism, the state of the university has reached triple-point. At the beginning of the new millennium the traditional notions of universitas—university as Utopia for the pursuit of Knowledge—have been marginalized by market imperatives: research funds, prestige value, endowment growth dominate the modern University agenda. Universities worldwide continuously produce knowledge, write patents, innovate new technologies.4 University destroyed Universitas, and is itself at the edge of crisis. If the groundless universitas was literally utopian, then the modern campus is the ideal University’s heterotopic counter-site. a society’s inversion, the heterotopia is at once removed from its context while at once being intimately bound up within its very culture. The global proliferation of universities at once reproduces the hegemonic subjectivities of Globalization’s willto-education, while simultaneously negating the sociopolitical context of the heteropic campus.5 Considering the modern university as an effectual mechanism of globalization, it ought to be examined through the lens with which we critique globalized capital.6 The replication of the university model across the globe via satellite campuses represents the incursion of foreign logics upon local territories.7 As distinct from colonialism per se, the university is not just a microcosmic core sample of a society and its accompanying politics to be transplanted elsewhere, a project of authoritarian translation, metropole’s inversion: the university is a metropolitan antithesis. Campus as anti-city, or enclave—what Castells has termed the transnational enclave.8 In the same way that the intimate frictions of vastly differing ideologies incited violent altercations between town and gown in the earliest

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

The men of Amherst College participate in a calisthenics class led by instructor and pianist at a grand piano. Engraved view of Pratt Gymnasium, Amherst College. (Harperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Weekly, February 21, 1885, p.125)

Design for Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, by A.J. Davis, c. 1856. AJ Davis considered the design of colleges in the same vein as the design of an asylum, prison, or hospital, with an emphasis on functionality and control.

Yet, still, the university, by way of its pernicious intimacy with the complexes of capitalist production, is essentially a normalizing institution. While the history of the late twentieth century is punctuated by moments in which university’s complicity with the mechanisms of late capitalism incite popular unrest, the story always ends in the same way: a brief period of popular consciousness is followed by an inevitable return to order by means of police action.10 The violation of the campus’ political bounds explicates the crisis of autonomy in the postmodern university. The superposition of disparate political orders is irreconcilable within the totalizing framework of the late capitalist city. Traditions of autonomy, whether upheld de facto or juridically campus as an extra-political space.11

The global dispersion of the University forms a constellation of extra-political territories whose supranational coordination echoes that of postmodern Empire. Just as late capitalism’s

Information. An archipelago, the global network of universities is both a ‘smooth’ extension of the post-Fordist economy and a discontinuous inversion of the global polis.12 Enmeshed within the complex mechanisms of the global economy, the postmodern university

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

colleges of Oxbridge, the postmodern campus is imbued with the latent potential to destabilize the status quo.9 Campus has always been a fascinating stage for the playing-out of binary oppositions. The University: standard-bearer for the pursuit of pure Truth, and the same, an engine for extracting practical utility from new Knowledge; institutional reproducer of subjectivity, while at once a context primed for the disruption and subversion of subjectivities.

diffuse, the university is bound loosely together by commonly held rules. Since the university’s medieval formation a series of dicta ius ubique docendi, Constitutio Habita, Magna Charta Universitatum.13 Academic capitalism forms the modus operandi of the postmodern university, despite its idealized independence from politics and the market. The University in the market economy endlessly chases revenue production. Growth is the dictate of success in the market. More is more. From the creation of non-academic consumable goods found in campus bookstores, to the displacement of student dining halls in lieu of national restaurant brands, campus has become a Consumer Paradise.14 Facing massive governmental de-investment, public universities, too, must engage in market activities as a matter of course. Students have become commoditized, a stream of revenue to be exploited by the burgeoning academic-capitalist offering courses taught by legions of underpaid graduate students.

upon the exploitation of a precariously situated labor force.15 The dot com boom of the nineties marked a radical transformation of production in the age of Empire: no longer was the economy tied to the reproduction of material wealth (vis-à-vis the industrial production of goods), but rather, vast wealth would be borne of speculation, the endless manipulation of exchange value. The virtual has unequivocally displaced the material. The disappearance of the factory from urban centers is perhaps the clearest evidence that the city has become the factory.16 The factory is everywhere, and nowhere—a pervasive, ethereal network.17 The rush on the University in the early aughts evidenced the position of higher education as an inroads to the post-Fordist labor market. In 2001, amid the excesses of new Globalization’s bull market, university tuition and enrollment surged, soaring past historical rates of growth. Enrollment, formats, tuition have since multiplied, transformed, and bloated. The market calls for the processing of more students, more tuition hours, more—. The University campus seems to wobble on the edge of anachronism as web-based educational models are the order of the day. The State’s endorsement of online education, and investment in MOOC initiatives foreshadows an immediate future: Knowledge will be free, and it will be online. The project of online higher education aims to equitize access to Knowledge. While the World Wide Web University is opening new avenues to Knowledge, the MOOC isn’t itself an equivalent alternative to and foremost a public space of ideas. In an era in which technology provides the ability for remote surveillance of the private communications of Billions, the web has quickly become less public than even the most insular private college campus. The threatened disappearance of publics is but one part of the crisis of the modern University.18 Crisis is a moment of opportunity. In which the normalizing parameters of the institution are shaken and dematerialized. Crisis is a duration in which the space of possibilities suddenly becomes vast.19 Witnessing the apocalyptic tail-end of university’s long-arc from religious scholasticism to academic capitalism, the university can be redirected to an alternatively productive model within and against late capitalism. “A building has to hold the forces that might want to transgress its order and should accommodate them through the management of the spaces so that at the same time, the same forces are restrained.”20 Campus does not disavow the forces of capital and Globalization, but rather seeks to inscribe a space that is simultaneously within and without. While the concepts of institution and utopia are seemingly antithetical (the institution is literally the ‘establishment,’ the utopia ‘No-place.’), elements of the one are always, necessarily, bound up in the workings of the other. The University is an institution that holds a utopian ideal at its core, a fact of its heterotopia-

function.21 Campus exploits the University’s heterotopian logic by creating an alternative utopia in the contemporary University’s place. The Utopian animus of the University has always been the pursuit of Truth. However, the entry of capital has transformed this simple logic into one of exchange. The modern University is a site for the exchange of knowledge for value, the entry of commoditized knowledge. In order for the University to nourish its ideal it must regain autonomy. The University must divorce the pursuit of Truth from the pursuit of capital.22

functions of economy, it can reposition the university as a necessary, productive public at the core of society.23 Campus proposes a space for the exchange, pursuit, and generation of Knowledge that empowers the Knower (the precariously situated Knowledge Worker) by establishing a discernible place for him within urban society.24 The Knower is a unique member of the Knowledge Society. Precariously employed, highly educated, and young; the Knowledge worker’s needs are worlds apart from those of previous generations. Frenetic nodes in a highly charged network, Knowers thrive on proximity,

Campus imagines a social contract between universitas and context that governs an order of exchange that is inclusive rather than exclusive, connective rather than disjunctive. By way of a simple agreement, Knowers can become an integrated component in the social ecology of cities. In exchange for the monetary support of the urbs, the Knower agrees to apply his accumulated knowledge to its dissemination: the Knower becomes Teacher. The city guarantees its own future vitality through this multigenerational exchange. Public investment in the young Knower is repaid by his commitment to become a Teacher, to educate future Knowers, and citizens alike. Campus thus short-circuits the late capitalist paradigm of educational attainment: cash for Knowledge, and resituates the university in relationship to a public.

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

While the separation of education from the reproduction of value

Campus can no longer be a colonized territory of late capitalism, the University an outpost of the disembodied market. For the Institution to regain the precious ground of autonomy, it ought to remember that campus, while referring to ground, structure, and

the University must strive towards autonomy, it cannot become a hermetic enclave. Throughout its history the University has been, for better or for worse, bound to its reality—and all of the frictions and compromise that entails. Campus thus imagines a radical accommodation of the forces that seek to transgress the limits of the institution and its ideals. A project of utopian realism, Campus recognizes the reality of the University in late

than adversarial conditions?

Endnotes: 1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2 Neave, Blückert, Nybom, eds., The European Research University: An Historical Parenthesis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 3 Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, A History of the University in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) pp. 92-96. 4 Jeffrey Williams, "The Pedagogy of Debt" in Edufactory: Towards a Global Autonomous University (New York: Autonomedia, 2009) pp. 89-96. 5 Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" October (March 1967) 6 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000) 7 Andrew Ross, "The Rise of the Global University" in Edufactory, pp. 18-31. 8 Castells, Chapter 2: "The Network and the Self" in The Rise of the Network Society. 9 The student uprisings of 1968, and 1971 in New York, Paris, and Athens, e.g. Radical student-activist demonstrations had lasting effects on the composition, and policy of both Universities and cities. In Paris, after the end of student revolts, the state education system atomized the Université de Paris, creating smaller campuses scattered about the periphery. See Ridder-Symoens. 10 Like the uprisings at the Sorbonne, and three years later in Athens, the Columbia University protest was ended by the intervention of the civic police force. Foucault was greatly affected by a similar experience in Tunisia, March 1968, in which massive student strikes were dissolved by police brutality. See Didier Eribon Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) p. 194. from civic control, was established in the medieval period at many European universities. The University of Prague was famously spared in the Russian supression of the Prague Spring uprisings, 1968. polis as the socially-produced space of the city; the space of, and produced by politics. The University, understood as an exclusive enclave (per Manuel Castells, "A New Globe in the Making") might thus be considered a disjunctive space within the global network. 13 Sheldon Rothblatt, "University as Utopia" in European Research University, Neave, Blückert, eds. 14 Campus succumbed to Junkspace sometime in the early-2000s. See Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace" October 100 (Spring 2002): 175-190. 15 Ilkka Kauppinnen has argued that the University is no longer a promoter of national economic competitiveness, but that Universities have impelled the "transnationalization" of academic capitalism. See "Towards transnational academic capitalism" in Higher Education vol. 64, no. 4 (October 2012): 543-556. 16 The University is considered a component of the city-as-productive-mechanism in "All Power to Self-Education," introduction to Edufactory: Towards a Global Autonomous University. 17 The un-rooting of centers of production is a key facet of 'network culture,' and a factor contributing to the productive agent's precarity in the late market economy. See Kazys Varnelis, "The Rise of Network Culture" in Networked Publics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012) pp. 145-164. 18 The relative attraction of online education might be considered one symptom of the recent swing towards austerity politics post-2008. See Pier Vittorio Aureli, "Less is Enough" (Moscow: Strelka Institute, 2013) 19 Crisis has been appropriated as a productive force in the postmodern creative economy, see Agenda: can we sustain our ability to crisis? De Smedt, Clouette, Neiheiser, eds., (Barcelona: Actar, 2009) 20 Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara "A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist City" Architectural Design vol. 81, no. 1, January 2011. 21 Rothblatt, "University as Utopia." 22 Autonomy is a precondition for the pursuit of Knowledge, as argued by Stanley Aronowitz in The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 23 Antonio Negri, "From Koolhaas's 'Generic City' to 'Junkspace' in Berlage Survey of the Culture, Education, and Practice of Architecture and Urbanism, Salomon Frausto ed., (Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers, 2011). 24 Loosely analagous to what Richard Florida imagined as the constitutive members of the 'creative class.' Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). 25 Reinhold Martin, "Utopian Realism" Online.

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Central Concourse, Governor’s State University, Park Forest South, Illinois, by Caudill Rowlett Scott, 1969. Education as a form of Shopping? “We needed a central concourse which was everyone’s domain, where things would happen that would be relevant to everyone. The program goals of openness and mix of people and activities evolved into the academic street concept. It’s an educational shopping center

Terrace

Scenes CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

ACT II

SCENE I EDU-FACTORY or the University as Research Mill Research (dollars). There is no need for Byzantine ethical posturing or skunk-works secrecy in Edu-factory. Veritas than oil, gas, or gold, becomes valuable in its exchange. contact, lines of discussion, planes of argumentationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Edufactory collapses Life and Labor.

Site

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The Hangar (Plan)

Knowers invest themselves with Knowledge; in the process they soak up value like a sponge. (Knowledge couldn’t ever be entirely dissociated from the Tower—technically distinct—explicitly proximate.

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

The Plate (Plan)

Knowers are vehicles for the exchange of information, and are the sole agents of its production. Disciplinarity is abolished; new minds for new problems. The epicenter of production, Edufactory is a re-producer of the Social.

The Hangar

Big Blue

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Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

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Monuments

Knowledge Space without compromise. The Public Realm is a Productive Realm. Space within Edu-factory is probed, and surveilledâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;big Data records all discussion before cataloguing, processing, and re-broadcasting elsewhere (within the Tower as well as without). The Tower is a cerebral transistor.

Lobby

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Axonometric

Knowers from far and wide congregate in the Hall nearly every week as conferences converge, and dissipate according to well-practiced routine. Immense congregations build overnight. The Habitations become crowded, lively and dense as nomadic scholars turn up en masse. Postmodern globe-trotters stop over for a weekend in the Tower as they traverse the hyperspace of late capitalismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Knowledge Economy. No sooner have they settled do they depart, continuing along on a maniacal dĂŠrive between the outposts of the Knowledge Empire.

SCENE II UNIVER-CITY or the University as Export-Enclave A playground at the scale of a state. Economics don’t apply here, well, perhaps not in the usual sense. In the Kingdom, economics rule all, but it’s a strange sort of equation that Rules. Supply and demand, no longer chimeric duality held apart in an endless dance—here, supply and demand coincide. Economics in service of an omnipotent Id machine: desire unleashed upon the world. Everywhere echoes of another place (Weren’t we here just yesterday, Didi?) The compound is set apart from the desert by a series of perfect ramparts. The world outside seeps in through a controlled series of trolled. High security. A sense of foreboding saturates the atmosphere.

Site

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Situations

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Oasis

From the portside of a jet descending into DYS one is struck by two things: of the runway;

second, the sheer monotony of the desert beyond. The cubic

poised against a limitless horizontality. “The desert inspires a cruel kind of longing.”

Skyline

The Tower is a replica. atmosphere of elsewhere. Outside, the monotony of the desert is ferociously Real. A thin envelope mediates the extreme differential. Within, Ideals projected within a Wanting Void. Leafy Yards in the desertâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a profound disjunction between here and there is perversely satisfying. The Earth is ruthlessly subjugatedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;foreign plants subsist under the Desert sun, carefully preserved by an elaborate, subterranean life support system.

Strada

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Monument (Elevation)

The Hanging Gardens At the summit of University sits a surreal reproduction of a New England landscape. A curated sampling of the best Greens, Yards, and Quads nearly imperceptible, and decidedly irrelevant.) A simulacrum of historical tradition, a lush landscape upon which Tower-dwellers act out Collegiate fantasies, temporarily free. It is a nostalgic recreation of an idyll that never was. They are Elysian belong, Univer-city is an Ivory Tower beneath an Ivy toupee.

Architecture of Density

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Development

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Frame

At the base of the University is a vast trading hall. Here shares in the productive futures of would-be initiates are traded, derived, exchanged. Hedge funds compete to buy derivative shares in the Class of 20xx. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Potential for working, bought and sold

SCENE III CONSUMER PARADISE or the University as Theatre of Consumerism The City had become a Mall.

Site

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Consumer Paradise (Plan)

A bank of escalators descends into the food court to whisk initiates up into a Cloud of indulgence. The pursuit of Knowledge is an innocuous alibi for prolonged Consumptive conspicuities. Would-be Knowers submit themselves voluntarily to the Regime of Debtâ&#x20AC;Ś students voluntarily indebtedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in exchange for a few years of fast-times.

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Food Court

A luxe terrazzo unfolds underfoot in every direction. Everything gleams is implemented to optimize the sensations of Day and Night). Exact airdown gently from audio-emitters surreptitiously installed in the ceiling plenum. An uncanny continuity pervades the uncountable rooms of Paradise. comprehensible. Cutting-edge HVAC maintains homeostasis ad extrema. The University is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;loose confederation of faculties with an allegiance to the central heating plant.â&#x20AC;? Silence is nowhere to be found; elevator music engages in a constant battle with the perceptible howl of an omnipresent HVAC.

Atrium

Sitting precipitously above the void sits a crown of Hotel Suites. Heroic elevator bundles pierce the void with Piranesian audacity. The immediate needs of a transient population are automatically provided for in the rooms. Food, liquids, climate, entertainment, all optimized to ensure spontaneous and uninterrupted satisfactionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a Taylorized machine for rest.

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Spectacle

myriad deus ex machinaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the infrastructure of communication. In the center of Paradise a slowly rotating disc presents a never-ending deluge of TEDTalks. Enthusiastically received by an over-caffeinated studio audience, the broadcasts are simulcast throughout the world. Knowledge explodes from the University in frenetic spurts, at all hours of everyday.

Consumer Paradise (Elevation)

laboratoriesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Glazed spaces for ethnographic observation, or the Spectacular display of a continual, fantastic, drama of the Life-Academic.

Skyline

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Skyline

A vast golf course spills across the roofâ&#x20AC;Ś an ersatz Arcadia, open Daily.

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

SCENE IV Speculator or the University as Developer The Great lateral expansion of the late twentieth century. A thin coating of manufactured urbanism pulled taut over the surface of the earth. City-building is perfected, a mechanical art executed at manic pace.

Site

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Mat

Operating behind the veil of a shell corporation, the University accumulates massive tracts of territory without arousing the suspicion of the Town. The image of occupation is preserved (to the extent deemed absolutely, legally necessary) as fatigued security guards make endless rounds, turning lights methodically on and off. The Empire of Vacancy deftly simulates occupancy. The University builds a wasteland of empty Space to simulate insatiable demand and provoke the perception of scarcity, a one-man cartel at the helm of a Potemkin metropolis.

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Favela

rapacious appetite of the University. They seek shelter outside of the to a room, three, then four as dorms become tenements. Collective housing communities emerge ad hoc (though these too evaporate as more and more

Neighbor

entire neighborhoods as it builds a vast stock of vacant space according to a risky dictum: Build it and They Will Come.

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Intramural

The engorged campus spreads a delicate Ivy veneer over the city (Tweedwash®, a lucrative development strategy now sweeping Cambridge, MA), Academicism hangs in the air, and registers upon land values. “Authenticity” is preserved at all costs—historical structures are carefully taxidermied. Facades painstakingly embalmed, interiors mercilessly eviscerated. New quadrangles metastasize a cancerous urbanism that threatens to swallow up the City.

Developer (Section)

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Developer (Plan)

and recording the movements of the security guards through the Vacant Empire. They synchronize schedules and draft a complex choreographyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;covert movements between empty spaces according to anticipated incursions. They are often nearly discovered. It is a constant migration. Students spend nights in different rooms, then are re-absorbed into the Tower by morning, leaving not a trace. Student life becomes a new nomadism, the University becomes migrational City.

SCENE V Genesis (Epilogue) Once, there was a city altogether quite unremarkable. With the exception of the Monument that stood in the city center, it was a place most like any other. “The time is noon on an ordinary week-day; the season of the year does not matter. The weather is fair to moderate. It is not raining, but the sky is not clear; it is a uniform light grey, uninteresting and somber, and the street lies in a dull and sober light which robs it of all mystery, all much noise and crowd, corresponding to the not over-busy character of the town. Tram-cars glide past, a cab or two rolls by, along the pavement stroll a few residents, colorless folk, passers-by, the public—’people.’ Royal Highness, Thomas Mann The Building had stood in the center of town for as long as anyone could remember, and before then, too. It was no more than 200 meters on each side. It stood above a patch of ground, campus.

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Living Room (Plan)

Over the years the bounds of campus had slowly eroded. The city dwellers confused one ground for another, and soon nobody could remember which was which. At the end of the century, the city swelled, and with it tooâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the University. They descend upon Campus with unerring regularity. Hysterical pleas are made storm the gates of Campus each Fall. The berserk frenzy marks the passing of years. The Patient are rewarded. Initiatives become intrepid pioneers of an unfamiliar urbanity. Loading into the elevators, the huddled Knowers eagerly await their arrival.

Streets were soon clogged with idealistic, energetic peripatetics. Street corners hosted impromptu seminars. Sidewalks became classrooms. Suddenly, in one swift, acrobatic lunge. Sous les pavés, la plage. They name their new city “University.”

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Stoa

In the center of University, the Tower. An Absolute form, it stood for nothing but itselfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;A monument to its own objecthood. An indeterminate Ur-real, perhaps.)

in ruthless pursuit. A blank slate on which to project metropolitan desires.

Escape (Retreat)

The City Rises. Streets jam—pavement trampled beneath the feet of thousands. Service is suspended, “We apologize for the inconvenience.” Infrastructure outrages of the Town. A staunch group of hold-outs, no more than a couple thousand, retreat. They take up residence in the tower.

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Ascent

They descend upon Campus with unerring regularity. Hysterical pleas are made storm the gates of Campus each Fall. The berserk frenzy marks the passing of years. The Patient are rewarded. Initiatives become intrepid pioneers of an unfamiliar urbanity. Loading into the elevators, the huddled Knowers eagerly await their arrival.

Debates

Scholars huddled on muddy ground (Athens all over again. Democratic space realized at last?) The Refugees eagerly dream of new Urbanities. Impromptu symposia commence as the Knowers debate the formation of a masterpieceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a University: autonomous, pristine, ideal.

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Cell

the city they are shelteredâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if only for awhile, and at great cost. The students organized themselves, associating only with others from their towns and villages. They conducted themselves according to their customs, living and working cooperatively, protecting each other from raids by irate Townies, or the other student Nations.

Modules

Within the walls of the Tower, the City folds upon itself. A massive cabinet of metropolitan density, it is a frame of collective space, and a museum of the City that once was. Within, an energetic Public lay claim to Streets and Squares. City-Building is Civic-Stage; within the Tower a different quality of life lives on.

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Città

The Market had conquered the City. The production of architectures is the manufacture of commoditized the metastasization of the Urban. Urban renewal: the City became a for its own cannibalistic re-production. Campus: a constant battle city—quiet, slow. The old inexorably burdened by the new. Town and never the twain shall meet.

space for machine with the Gown, and

Library

After the crash, the World looked left and right for answers. Knowledge is Power. Campuses sprout up in locales familiar and exotic alike. Campus seams with surplus Labor. A system of rules is drafted: complete, total, thorough. They govern and ensure the re-production of immaculate spaces for the “Generation of Knowledge.” The administration fervently applauds the project, “at the dawn

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Teaching

The debates drag on for weeks at a time. Stultifying horizontalityâ&#x20AC;Ś the madness of their meetings sublime. Point Counter Point in a cyclical discourse of absurd proportions. Consensus is never reached. Discussion plods on, sideways, with no hint of relief. Still, they continue on, they fall in love with their debates. Competitions are held as Academics vie for erudite supremacy. For decades thereafter the Tower is host to manic debates of any- and every-thing, a stage for the constantly shifting pursuit of Truth. Before long the Knowers realize their Dreamed-of University has suddenly come into being.

ACT III Epilogue

the University must strive towards autonomy, it cannot become a hermetic enclave. Throughout its history the University has been, for better or for worse, bound to its realityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and all of the frictions and compromise that entails. Campus thus imagines a radical accommodation of the forces that seek to transgress the limits of the institution and its ideals. A project of utopian realism, Campus recognizes the reality of the University in late

CAMPUS: SITUATING THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY

Epilogue

than adversarial conditions?