Emory Campus Master Plan: History

Recent Trends in Campus Planning	This latter point brings the discussion of the evolution of the Emory campus to a critical juncture -- that of the dilemmas of planning and building on a modern campus. Some discussion of the context of modern architectural theory and its effect upon planning and building are in store. The First World War can be seen as having breached the social and political fortifications of the ancien regime by disrupting the economic, political and cultural traditions of the European aristocracy. The Second World War provided an even more drastic and catastrophic severing of ties with the past, through the rise of the totalitarian regimes of the Axis-Powers and the unthinkable genocide of the Holocaust. America's victory in the global conflict was in part attributed to its technical prowess and know-how. For the next twenty-five years the utopian myth of a "redemptive" technology would pervade all facets of American life ultimately concluding in the success of NASA's Apollo program in 1969. In an age where men walked on the moon, one might be compelled to ask how the character of architecture possibly be derived from ancient precedents?
"International Style"	Since Architecture is not practiced in a cultural vacuum, it is not surprising to see that the traditions which had propelled discourse in the discipline prior to the two wars would give way to a new technologically grounded discourse, often at the expense of valid yet now discredited humanist traditions. The seeds for this transformation in the United States had been planted as early as 1932 with the opening of the "International Style" show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition introduced a new body of theory and practice to the American architectural establishment and paved the way for the outright importation of modern European ideology to the United States. With the immigration of many European avant-garde architects during the war years, discourse in both practice and the academy underwent a radical change. Architects who endorsed the new style launched outright attacks on colleagues who were more comfortable with more traditional idioms. The "battle of the styles" was often brutal and many talented architects who were trained in the traditions of the Beaux-Arts found themselves labeled as "dinosaurs," and as a result they were sometimes even unable to secure commissions. In academia, Walter Gropius, the central figure in the design of the German school of art and architecture, The Bauhaus, assumed control over Harvard's Graduate School of Design, in 1937, and, his colleague, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, became the maestro of the Armor Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago. While the full impact of the importation of these and other European polemicists would have to await the return of "our boys" from the war, the foundations for change had undeniably been laid. Following the war, architectural discourse underwent a radical change. In place of the traditional five orders of Classical architecture, the cannons of composition, aspiration toward heroic monumental forms, and the rule of the styles, new theories were substituted expounding expression of the nature of materials, the pseudo-science of functionalism, design process as a form of social engineering, and expressions of the Zeitgeist as determinants of built form. Thus the type of campus and architecture proposed by Hornbostel and his contemporaries were dismissed as relics of a by-gone era. In many instances the architects of the post-war generation disregarded Beaux-Arts traditions without fully appreciating the principles and techniques that had been utilized by their predecessors.
Either "Tradition" or "Modernity"	While many of the arguments advanced by modern architects were indeed to identify significant shortcomings in the architectural traditions that had evolved over the preceding five-thousand or so years, most architects saw the solution to their dilemma as an either / or choice -- one of "tradition" or "modernity," but in most cases, certainly not both. This exclusivist attitude permitted architects to conceptualize the problem of design in a wholly new way. Suppose, for example, an architect were commissioned to design a college library building. He or she would initiate a process of identifying the activities to be accommodated in the new building, its performance and technical requirements, the square footage of reading rooms, administrative areas, book stacks, and so on. The architect would make drawings of the site, survey soil conditions, research relevant building codes and zoning restrictions. So far the process would appear to be much the same as it had been in Hornbostel's day. The architect would then proceed with the body of assembled design information in order to compose an efficient and workable plan, something that Hornbostel and his contemporaries would have wholly endorsed, with one significant exception. The development of our architect's plan would not have been hindered by stylistic assumptions, cultural expectations, or specific physical attributes of context. Rather than viewing the design process as one of mediation between the conceptual and often abstract requirements of current technologies, uses, dynamic social factors, etc., and the cultural / physical context into which the project was to be situated, the architect dismissed the later in favor of the former. Thus the result is a process of design which has been relieved from addressing an entire dimension of the problem. No longer inhibited by the contingencies of tradition and context architect was free to design a building based upon a more narrow definition of the problem. So, while Hornbostel would have mediated the requirements of function, appearance and construction by the contingencies of tradition and context, the post-war architect, at least in theory, was no longer obliged to do so.