Gowns rewrite the town—twice over.

A casual scan across most urban campuses reveals that they have been building increasingly densely to accommodate new growth, after several decades of building at a lower density than the at their original, historic core. More often than not, they have no other choice. Suffering a scarcity of available land but benefiting from a captive clientele of student pedestrians, the campus planners and leadership must build upward on former parking lots or grassy corners. Otherwise, facilities planners often recommend purchasing homes in the adjacent neighborhood, so that the schools can claim them as administrative offices if they don’t bulldoze them altogether.

Some campuses have been widely constrained by the surrounding city for as long as anyone can remember, such as Harvard University and its heavily built-up surroundings of Cambridge, one of the most densely populated cities in the country (and almost definitely tops for densely populated suburbs). In this example, the venerable old academic buildings rest behind the gate along the right side of the principal artery Massachusetts Avenue while downtown commercial buildings of Cambridge’s Harvard Square sit along the left.

This next photo, taken at the dead center of the urban plaza Harvard Square, demonstrates how the public space has become a vertex of activity generated largely from three powerful forces.

The most obvious indicators are the brick Harvard buildings which comprise the background, but I am also standing at the heart of downtown Cambridge, where the cluster of buildings hosts both university administration and a variety of other prominent companies on their upper levels. Meanwhile, immediately to the right of this photo is the entrance to the Harvard Square T stop, with one of the highest average daily commuter traffic levels in the entire Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s rail network. The photo below more clearly reveals the centrality of the subway stop at this prominent urban node.

Cambridge’s densely commercial downtown has stymied Harvard’s ability to grow to the south of its campus core (the original Harvard Yard), so the majority of the university’s newer buildings trail northward, which is clearly visible to a pedestrian walking across campus from the remarkable shift in architecture. A third “phase” in the university’s development is largely discontiguous from the old and new campus: a few blocks south of Harvard Square sits the Kennedy School of Government and numerous university residential halls. From there, the university’s development pattern played leapfrog again: just south across the Charles River sits the Allston campus, which is currently home to the Business School and the majority of the athletic and sporting facilities. As sizable as this portion of the campus is, the Allston portion of Harvard is only poised to grow over the ensuing decades: the University has long been land banking various parcels in this old Boston neighborhood, and eventually the Allston campus, based on a carefully articulated planning process, will burgeon into the new life sciences hub for the school. (Recent news reveals that, in the face of the financial turmoil, the University has indefinitely suspended its prior plans for the Allston expansion indefinitely.)

Harvard and Cambridge share an antecedent that is quintessentially Northeastern—the majority of their conception predates the radical shifts in urban form precipitated by 20th century innovations. Other parts of the country have adopted a completely different approach, with development patterns that largely reflect their respective population growth trends. The southern boomburg of Nashville and its preeminent Vanderbilt University exemplify this trend, which could hardly be more different from the physical form of Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston.

Perhaps the most interesting element of Vanderbilt University’s history is the unusual level of disassociation with the person after whom it was named, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Distant relative and Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire of Nashville stayed with the Commodore while recovering from surgery in New York; he was able to persuade the 79-year-old rail magnate to endow and build a new university in the South that would “contribute to strengthening the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country.” McTyeire chose the site and supervised the construction of buildings, but Vanderbilt himself never saw it. He never visited Nashville, dying four years after the dedication, without knowing that his only major act of philanthropy would even be named after him.

Looking at the campus today, it takes no stretch of the imagination to surmise that it was largely conceived in a vacuum, judging from the striking contrast in physical form between the campus and the surrounding area—or, for that matter, the contrast between “the Vanderbilt community” and “the Harvard community”. The layout of the buildings themselves fits into the less rigidly formalistic design popular among many universities founded in the 19th century, with an almost consistent tree canopy, the biodiversity of which earned Vanderbilt campus classification as a national arboretum.

(I contrasted Vanderbilt’s campus with the neighboring Peabody campus in greater detail during an earlier blog post.)

What does the area immediately surrounding the campus look like? It’s not the outer suburbs, but it’s also clearly not quite the city center; downtown Nashville is a mile to the northeast. But it’s also not a particularly residential neighborhood, no does it meet conventional standards of older urban development. The streets which comprise the perimeter of the original Vanderbilt campus look much more like the photos below, where I was looking outward onto 21st Avenue South while standing at the campus edge:


The retail mix is largely the restaurant/coffee shop/bar combination one might expect to cater to a heavy concentration of college students. But the majority of it consists of freestanding, one-story buildings with abundant parking in front or at the side. Nearly all of it is automobile-oriented and less than forty years old. The other primary perimeter street to Vanderbilt, West End Avenue, offers a similar landscape:

The development embodies your average planner’s migraine: wide streets meant to convey automobile traffic quickly, with buildings that overwhelmingly fail to stimulate pedestrianism. To add insult to injury, the fact that the buildings are larger and detached gives them a higher gross leasable area and more opportunity for off-street parking, making the structure far more likely to accommodate tenants that are national chains with deep pockets. Even the few structures that are built flush with the sidewalk still seem to repel mom-and-pop stores. Instead of eclectic local enterprise immediately outside one of the nation’s most respected universities, the visitors’ eyes are greeted with this:



The horror! Frankly, I don’t want to devote a post to criticizing this sort of development; it might not be conducive to heavy tree canopy and might seem blandly suburban to some, but it has done nothing to harm the verdant beauty or repute of the University, and it does provide an abundance of convenient shopping opportunities for the students. Instead, I hope to evaluate it on its own terms, based on what it reveals about Nashville’s development in and around Vanderbilt.

Nashville was not a prominent city at the time of Vanderbilt’s establishment. With a population barely over 25,000, it may have been a comparatively large city within the mid-South region, but it was hardly a national center on par with a dozen different cities in the Northeast. (By comparison, Cambridge, Massachusetts had nearly twice as many people at that time, and it was always the adjacent community to the much larger city of Boston.) Even in the 1950s, the city limits of Nashville only contained about 175,000 inhabitants; the city’s emergence as the key city of Tennessee, surpassing Memphis to become a capital of the booming New South, did not really take place until the 1970s. Vanderbilt was founded in an almost rural area at the time; the urbanization of central Nashville clearly didn’t jolt in the direction of the school until well after the automobile. The photos below offers a quick snapshot of the “membrane” that connects Vanderbilt campus to Nashville downtown, where West End Avenue crosses Interstate 65:

The interstate forms a distinct edge between the downtown (on its northeast side) and the strikingly automobile-oriented growth pattern on the opposite, southwest side. My suspicion is that the US Highways 70 and 431, which comprise the general eastern and western boundaries of Vanderbilt, were predominantly quick exits from Nashville until suburban development patterns engulfed them. Interspersed amidst the auto-oriented development are visibly older structures, such as this church next to a contemporary office building:


Another example shows what appears to have been an old automobile service station that has been adaptively reused into conventional retail, all while preserving about two dozen off-street parking spaces:

And the structures below were featured from a distance in one of the earlier photos. They appear to be older private residences that have been adapted to retail uses:

The one on the right appears to have undergone a particularly intensive façade alteration in order to endow it with the first-floor fenestration that makes it a retail-friendly building. The prevailing question remains: how many of these older vestiges faced the bulldozer to make way for the strip mall development that predominates? Was the area immediately surrounding Vanderbilt always so sparsely settled? Not all of the greater Vanderbilt area consists of this fascinating automobile oriented/urban hybrid, but the exceptions are rare. Among the few areas near Vanderbilt with the true feel of an urban neighborhood is Hillsboro Village, a former streetcar suburb that emerges as one continues southwesterly along 21st Avenue South, the old Hillsboro Road. The area was long ago annexed by Nashville, but it retains a short strip of one- and two-story commercial buildings flush with the sidewalk; the only widely visible parking is directly on 21st Avenue. Not surprisingly, the floor plate of these structures, much smaller than your average auto-oriented retail building and typically with a 1-to-3 width-to-depth ratio, more widely supports the local restaurants and vendors typically associated with university communities—the type we often describe as “eclectic”. I unfortunately don’t have photos of Hillsboro Village of my own; this Flickr photo effectively captures the neighborhood’s character: perhaps the closest to Vanderbilt community’s Main Street.

Vanderbilt’s development offers a sort of architectural palimpsest, with one developmental language superimposed on another, based largely on expediency of the time period. From my observations, it appears that, for the first fifty to seventy years of Vanderbilt University’s institutional life, it sat in an almost rural setting on the purlieus of the small city of Nashville—a city which may have been less than 10 square miles in its totality at the time. As the city grew, predominantly after the automobile, the two primary streets (West End Avenue and 21st Avenue South) remained efficient arterials for conveying traffic out to the neighborhoods such as Hillsboro Village and the adjacent countryside, even as the countryside rapidly suburbanized. The built environment between Vanderbilt and Nashville thus overwhelmingly supports cars. Only in recent years have developers adapted to growing consumer preferences for a community with a more urban character, offering infill construction that supports higher residential density and promotes the walkability that seems natural for a large university environment. And the City of Nashville has demonstrated a growing support for higher density in these areas close to the downtown through the relatively recent implementation of Urban Zoning Overlay districts. The Vanderbilt area has undergone a distinctive succession of development styles: initially largely rural, it became stereotypically suburban before its proximity to downtown and the reliable employment base made it a potential location from emergent neighborhoods. The photo below, taken from a mid-rise hotel, effectively captures all three phases:

The turn-of-the-century residential presence largely suffered demolition to accommodate strip malls and car-friendly shopping plazas, but now mid and high-density multifamily developments, hotels, and office buildings are taking advantage of infill opportunities on the remaining tracts of vacant land. Nashville may never be as dense as Cambridge (and most likely the majority of Nashville’s residents prefer it that way), but the lack of density in some regards enhances its versatility, like a painting with a great deal of canvas still exposed. The transitional area around Vanderbilt University is showing a remarkable adaptivity to cultural shifts in preferred lifestyles, fusing urban intensity with the relaxed vibe of a college town through incremental infill developments. In another decade or two, fashionable urban living may demand new architectural incarnations, and I am willing to bet that Nashville will be more receptive to it than many places—it’s clearly less hemmed-in than a city like Cambridge and widely open to reinvention. If the city can retain its high level of housing affordability, I imagine it will enjoy many more years of boomtown status to come.

Campuses have back yards too.

Though I had driven through the mid-southern boomtown of Nashville before in the past, this past weekend was the first time I had left the interstate to tour the city briefly. One of the first stops was the venerable, woodsy campus of Vanderbilt University, just a mile or so away from the city center. Much of the campus offered exactly what one might expect from an older urban academia: uniform, solid brick buildings with limestone Doric columns, well-maintained grassy quadrilaterals crisscrossed with foot paths, a generous tree canopy (at least in the summer), an alarming overpopulation of squirrels. Those more familiar with Vanderbilt can surely describe it better than I; those unfamiliar at least can conjure a facile image.

What took me by surprise was a chance encounter with this beast in the southern half of the campus:

And of course, this pole’s identical siblings stand approximately 250 feet away in either direction. It’s rare to see such a jarringly large utility line in the interior of a campus. In fact, it’s rare to see utilities on a campus at all—nearly all private schools are willing to front the cost to run the lines underground.

In many ways, the presence of overhead wires in urban settings distinguishes the US from most other developed countries. The American landscape is littered with them, even in relatively dense inner city neighborhoods. Only a few settings come to mind in the US where electric wires are not widely visible: downtowns usually employ buried cables, as do newer subdivisions built since the 1970s, and large parcels under single corporate ownership (such as a university). The comparative lower density of US cities no doubt necessitates much higher costs for burying wires than would be the case in, for instance, the Netherlands. Our population is spread over a significantly greater land area, and loosely translates to negative economies of scale in terms of the square footage of cable per person served, equating to higher costs in physical utility installation per person, whether as poles or undergrounded. However, overhead wires elicit other inefficiencies: they are far more likely to suffer power outages from fallen tree limbs or toppled poles after storms or heavy wind. Many urban utilities companies must pay for tree trimming on private lots to protect the cables from snapping, with costs most certainly passed down to the consumer. Utility easements grant them this privilege, resulting in roadside properties with funny-looking, lopsided trees.

Conversely, undergrounding cables never completely eliminates the possibility of power outages, and a severe outage on an underground system may be harder to access or repair. In addition, cities that engage in a fair amount of road alterations such as widening or storm sewer additions may find that underground cables are far easier and cheaper to maneuver around, while underground cables would cost a fortune to relocate. Regions with a high level of seismic activity also need to be conscious of the vulnerability of buried electrical cables. I have also read on occasion that the speed of electrical transmission across great distances is inferior on underground cables, thus explaining—beyond the sheer costs—why sparsely populated rural areas almost always depend on overhead cables. (My source on this last bit of information is questionable; perhaps an electrical engineer can confirm or contradict it.)

Arguments favoring and opposing overhead cables are clearly numerous, often leaving the investment decision at a stalemate, in which each location gets individual consideration. The one determinant in which buried cables always wins is aesthetics. Overhead cables are an unsightly blight on the landscape to most people—no doubt many commercial photographs of great vistas have had the power lines blotted out courtesy of Adobe Photoshop. So why did Vanderbilt choose not bury these lines that rest fully within the campus? My guess is the answer is quite simple—this is not a part of the campus that Vanderbilt leadership wants or expects most of the public to see.

In hindsight, I’m kicking myself for not taking more good photos of the campus, but the combination of what I did take and some campus maps should get the point across. The oldest part of the campus remains sequestered from the majority by busy 21^st Avenue South:

This area (outlined in blue in the campus map below) is known as the Peabody Campus, because it originated as the George Peabody College for Teachers upon splitting from the University of Nashville in 1875. In 1979, it merged with Vanderbilt University and assumed the name Peabody College of Education and Human Development. While the majority of the top-ranked graduate school of education classes take place on the Peabody Campus, its buildings also host classes for undergraduates, administrative offices, as well as some dormitories. Its largest distinction is the strictly geometric layout of its buildings, somewhat visible in the photos as well as the campus map.

The distinctive origin design of the Peabody campus design becomes more evident when contrasted with the historic main campus of Vanderbilt to the northwest. Indicated by the red outline in the campus map, this section of “Old Vanderbilt” adopts a much more organic campus layout—looser and much less emphasis on perpendicularity than the Peabody Campus.

Apparently the biodiversity of this portion of campus has earned it the designation as a national arboretum. This section and the Peabody Campus receive the highest level of utility upgrades; not a single overhead cable is visible here.

The approximate spot where I took the original photo of the utility pole is indicated by the orange circle on the campus map. This area, and virtually everything to both the south and west of it, represents the preponderance of Vanderbilt’s expansions. Most of the university’s expansion began in the 1950s, and it shows. Whereas Peabody and the old Vanderbilt campus are almost completely pedestrianized, with the majority of academic buildings fronting foot trails, the newer portion of the campus reflects the more automobile dominating ethos of the time. Unfortunately the only photo I took that accurately demonstrates this is the first one on this blog post with the utility pole, but it at least hints at the widespread campus design typology of the second half of the twentieth century. The cars, parked perpendicular to the curb, enjoy dedicated parking along a right of way that does not function as a city street, nor is it purely a parking lot. These “campus roads” that weave their way through most universities of a reasonably size usually have two origins: they are formerly city roads that served a residential neighborhood, both of which (homes and road ROW) have been purchased and claimed by the university, giving the school the freedom to design traffic flow and parking to its own standards; they were integrated into the university’s own master plan and never existed as part of the public right of way, again giving the university almost unlimited freedom. In this case, I suspect these campus roads owe their current existence to the first of the two aforementioned scenarios. The brown lines I have traced on the campus map show an inchoate grid pattern that most likely formerly serviced private residences; many of the homes where either purchased or demolished by the university to make way for fraternities and sororities. The roads directly serving the Greek housing still maintain many of the characteristics of conventional rights of way, but one street (indicated by the brown line that terminates in the orange circle) looses its ROW character and becomes more of a logistical service route, with dedicated parking. This is also the point where the conventional urban grid breaks down and, instead of the roads defining the shape of parcels and the buildings that rest upon them, the building alignment seems to have dictated part of the trajectory of the road. I’ve included a few more photos below that show how this phenomenon influences the buildings in the new campus, provided from the Vanderbilt website.

Lupton Hall is one wing within a larger quad structure, but it rests on Vanderbilt Place (no doubt purchased by the university but with public access) and it features a separate vehicular drop-off point.

The Ben Schulman Center for Jewish Life is a particularly new addition at the corner of Vanderbilt Place and 25^th Avenue South. The off-street parking is marginally visible to the far left.

The need for 22,000 square feet of parking would have seemed unconscionable prior to the expansion, but by the time the Kensington Garage was built at the intersection of Kensington Place and 25^th Avenue South, it critically served university staff and faculty as well as guests to a neighboring hotel.

Most likely my original photo featured a different perspective of this 1920s-era power house. The prominent smoke stack is an unlikely feature not commonly seen in most campuses. Interestingly, the campus website claims here that all house-run utilities are underground, which leads one to question why it would make such a claim when above ground facilities are plainly visible. Could it be that the power lines running through campus service other parts of the city and the City of Nashville simply needed to wind across parts of Vanderbilt campus?

Regardless of whether the utility placement is by-right or by easement, it clearly remains the underbelly of the institution—the mess of wires and gears that makes the place tick. Nearly every major campus has a portion like this—the section where aesthetics took a back seat to the convenience of parking, or vehicle unloading, or the necessity of a close electric substation. It would be lunacy for Vanderbilt’s admissions office to coordinate tours in this portion of the campus—the whole area feels like logistical roads for vehicle unloading, while the main entrances to the buildings themselves seems almost hidden. Like most urban development in the 1950s and subsequent decades, both the scale of the structures and the flow created by linear paths disfavor the pedestrian. The buildings might be generally close together and contiguous with the old campus—after all, students aren’t necessarily going to own cars and will still need access to the expansion sections of campus—but the planning seems far less cognizant of foot traffic than 19^th century Vanderbilt, which is human scaled by necessity. The new campus seeks to accommodate both the car and the pedestrian, but it is axiomatic that only the pedestrian will make any sacrifices in this case. The result is sprawl, university style.

This dichotomy between old and may have little bearing on the overall success of the university, but the fact that campus facilities has made no effort to conceal those aggressive electric poles speaks much about the aesthetic stance the university takes to its new development. Most contemporary American cities are devoting an inordinate amount of resources to revitalizing their downtowns, largely because, no matter how much it may decentralize, the downtown remains the foremost location by which an outsider is going to form an impression of a city. Downtown is the city’s front door. Accordingly, old campus and Peabody are the front door of Vanderbilt—the images of walking tours, of postcards, of an officially dedicated arboretum. Some of the suburbs of metro Detroit are lovely—but the first images that come to mind when one thinks of Detroit is a decaying old city center from Robocop. I am not denigrating the development patterns and practices from the age of the automobile, but the positioning of the old historic center of downtowns and campuses demonstrates a perhaps unconscious preference for the way old walkable hubs look and how they accommodate visitors. Contemporary downtowns are increasingly adapting to a growing demand for building and street designs that engages the pedestrian. Most likely, subsequent development at Vanderbilt will follow the same pattern, eventually minimizing the back yard, no-man’s land feel that comprises a significant portion of the campus. And in time it may also impel the university to bury those power lines.