Place-making and Place-marking

Civic design and campus design have similar objectives: generating a sense of place that serves and symbolizes institutional values and purposes.

Appropriate aesthetic expressions can be created through architectural forms and shapes, materials and colors, that celebrate their time, temperament and technology.

The cathedral square skyline in Tuscany, above left, is a soaring, confident rendition of classical design. The combination of sculpture, hard-edge modern architecture, and mast gives the parallel view of a western American campus an equally unequivocal example of contemporary place-making and place-marking.

Opportunities for "making a statement" should flow from the campus planning process. The conceptualization and location of such ensembles thus requires careful attention to campus design, programmatic goals and objectives, and a site determination that examines practical matters such as circulation, and visual factors such as sight-lines on the ground plane as well as potential skyline vistas.

Richard P. Dober