Our nation's campuses and university grounds are remarkable places where visions of community are embedded in physical form and space. Beginning with our nation's first campus plans at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton Universities, the shapers of these places created "greens" and "yards." A second wave of college construction, according to City Planner Richard Dober, ran through the Civil War and "continued the colonial aesthetic: greenswards, tree-lined walkways, buildings and plantings situated in space, rather than enclosing buildings." It is these characteristic relationships between buildings and landscape features that define the sense of place at colleges such as Dickinson in Pennsylvania, Bowdoin in Maine, and Davidson in North Carolina. Most importantly, the elements that distinguished such American composition of University buildings and landscape from their European precursors contributed to the emergence of a unique American form of pastoral urbanism.

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History