"The Cloister and the Green: The Glorious American Campus" with Witold Rybczynski

Thursday, August 20 at 4:00pm 
Lecture held at Maren Auditorium, MDI Biological Laboratory
with reception to immediately follow at Garland Farm
$10 members / $20 non-members / free for students

*If you register to attend on Zoom, a link will be sent you separately. Registrations within one hour of the program's start may not be received in time for you to participate live, but you will be sent a recording of the program once the video has been processed and uploaded.

Architectural historian Witold Rybczynski will review the European origin of universities in the Middle Ages and unique forms that they took, especially in Britain. The Oxbridge college was influential in the United States, but there were a number of issues that made the American campus unique: their number, their location, their physical settings, and, not least, their architecture. Rybczynki will discuss the influence Beatrix Farrand had on the design of the American campus landscape.

Rybczynski has been described as “one of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture” by Library Journal. He has written over twenty books on subjects as varied as the evolution of comfort, a history of the weekend, American urbanism, and a search for the origins of the screwdriver. His forthcoming book (September 2026), What Architecture Is, explores what it is about architecture that distinguishes it from an
ordinary building, taking on the age-old question of what elevates a mere building into an art form.

Witold Rybczynski photo credit: David Graham
Illustration: A university class in Bologna, c. 1350