rather than automobiles, where people may pass from one location to another by a variety of paths, perhaps cutting through quads or even passing through other buildings.
The most typical architecture of a university campus is neo medieval, with cloisters and "ivied halls," harking back to the medieval origins of the Western university. But the term "campus" is even older a Latin word, referring originally to the open field used for military exercises, and preserved in a variant form as "camp" for a military post. Indeed, military bases still have more than a passing similarity to college campuses in their general layout: both reject the "city block" organization for subtler arrangements of buildings, and getting around either one can leave the outsider perplexed, confused, and, soon enough, lost.
Yet the great universities of England, Oxford and Cambridge, are striking to the American visitor for the degree to which they fail to have the characteristics of a "campus." Oxford University, especially, is all but hopelessly intermingled with the city of Oxford. These ancient universities grew up over so long a period of time, with so many ups and downs, that no overall plan of organization ever seemed to define them.
Trinity College Dublin, though founded centuries later than Oxford or Cambridge, is itself centuries old, predating the first permanent English settlement of America (Trinity College was evidently supposed originally to be just one of a number of colleges making up the University of Dublin, along the lines of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. But no other college was founded, and Trinity College Dublin and the University of Dublin are synonymous. See Maxwell, Trinity College, 6.) Yet, far more than any other early British university, it has the quality of "spacious formality" that gives it a distinctive atmosphere as a campus, not merely a collection of collegiate buildings.
Several factors may ...