Lawrence Speck, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was dean of architecture from 1992 to 2001. He is also a principal in the architecture firm Page Southerland Page.

I am a big fan of college campuses that have a real sense of order, cohesiveness, and harmony. I think universities have produced some of the most outstanding physical environments in the United States primarily because they have believed in planning and in the power of multiple buildings to create a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts. I think contextual concerns should be a major design determinate in creating any building on a college campus.

But I am dismayed by what seems like a current trend among many universities to establish a style for buildings on their campuses and to slavishly replicate buildings in that style. This, I presume, is seen as a means to gain the order, cohesiveness, and harmony that is so desirable. But, in fact, it often produces campuses that are like army camps—lifeless, repetitive, and banal.

Many of the great old American campuses—like those at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities—have revered cores that are wonderfully coherent, but also rich and diverse architecturally. Harvard Yard has buildings made of refined red brick beside buildings made of rugged gray stone. It has pieces whose style we would call Georgian that sit very comfortably near buildings like Sever Hall, by H. H. Richardson. Sever was considered extremely progressive and innovative when it was built, in the late 19th century, and it is certainly not Georgian.

Yale’s Old Campus is similarly diverse, as is the substantial fabric built around it in the 1920s and 1930s. In the latter period there was a real argument between Georgian style and Gothic style (sometimes, as in Davenport College, in the same building). The Yale campus maintains the virtues of order, cohesiveness, and harmony without resorting to mindless replication of style. The result is rich, diverse, and endearing. Individual buildings, courts, and other places have their own personality and charm and yet fit comfortably into a larger whole.

I love how three of Princeton’s most iconic, historic buildings—Alexander Hall, Nassau Hall, and Chancellor Green Hall—sit next to each other at the heart of the campus in three distinctly different styles—Richardsonian Romanesque, Neoclassical Georgian, and Victorian Gothic. They speak eloquently of three different eras in Princeton’s history (and, indeed, in America’s history).

I think it would be better if we tried to learn deep, trenchant lessons from the past, rather than just lifting stylistic images from it. What gives these historic campuses that we love their authentic robustness and character? How did they manage to add each new element with genuine respect for surrounding context, but also with a true fidelity to the notion that they were building progressive institutions with an obligation to the present and the future? How did they make large, complex, yet coherent environments that maintained distinction and individuality in the parts such that each corner of the campus has its own personality and identity?

In sum, isn’t there a better way to achieve order, cohesiveness, and harmony on a campus than by the kind of one-liner method of replicating style? —Lawrence Speck