Episode 06: Nader Tehrani on the Look and Feel of College Campuses

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Students always talk about the “feel” of a college campus being that indescribable and critical deciding factor that influences their decision to apply and eventually to enroll at a college. Are colleges supposed to feel a certain way? Why? Where’d this feeling come from and what are today’s designers thinking about when designing spaces of higher education? Nader Tehrani, former head of the architecture department at MIT and current Dean of the School of Architecture at Cooper Union helps me answer these questions and more.

It’s April in the college admissions world (in the rest of the world too I guess) and that means that admitted students and their families are visiting campuses across the country in the final effort to make up their minds about where to enroll. This always involves fairly heavily-curated and well-produced dog and pony shows meant to display all the glory that is any given campus. The “feel” of a campus is one thing that really won’t be the same at any two places. So what’s behind that feel?

In this episode, Nader Tehrani of gives us a heady explanation of the art, history, and sociology involved in helping design spaces for learning in a community. We talk about the differences between colleges in the middle of a city (like his alma mater the Rhode Island School of Design) versus the more traditional “New England Campus” (like RISD’s neighbor down the street, Brown). We talk about how the history of collegiate instruction and how that has shaped learning space, the value of “brick and mortar” campuses in the era of MOOCs and online learning, the value of “the spaces in between” those which are designed, and how elements of campus space can in themselves be offensive.

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