A campus traditionally refers to the land and buildings of a college or university.[1] This will often include libraries, lecture halls, student centers and, for residential universities, residence halls and dining halls.
By extension, a corporate campus is a collection of buildings and grounds that belong to a company, particularly in the technology sector. Examples include Bell Labs, the Googleplex and Apple Park.[2]
Campus comes from the la|campus, meaning "field", and was first used in the academic sense at Princeton University in 1774.[3] At Princeton, the word referred to a large open space on the college grounds; similarly at the University of South Carolina it was used by 1826 to describe the open square (of around 10 acres) between the college buildings. By the end of the 19th century, the term was used widely at US colleges to refer to the grounds of the college, but it was not until the 20th century that it expanded to include the buildings as well.[4]
The tradition of a campus began with the medieval European universities where the students and teachers lived and worked together in a cloistered environment.[5] The notion of the importance of the setting to academic life later migrated to America, and early colonial educational institutions were based on the Scottish and English collegiate system.[5]
The campus evolved from the cloistered model in Europe to a diverse set of independent styles in the United States. Early colonial colleges were all built in proprietary styles, with some contained in single buildings, such as the campus of Princeton University or arranged in a version of the cloister reflecting American values, such as Harvard's.[6] Both the campus designs and the architecture of colleges throughout the country have evolved in response to trends in the broader world,[7] [8] with most representing several different contemporary and historical styles and arrangements.
The meaning expanded to include the whole university institutional property during the 20th century, with the old meaning persisting into the 1950s in some places.
In the early 1990s the term began to be used to describe a company's office building complex, most notably when Apple's Infinite Loop campus was first built, which at the time was exclusively for research and development. The Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, is another example of this usage, although it was built in the 1980s, before the term was applied to company property. In the 21st century, hospitals and even airports[9] sometimes use the term to describe the territory of their respective facilities.
The word campus has also been applied to European universities, although some such institutions (in particular, "ancient" universities such as Bologna, Padua, Oxford and Cambridge) are characterized by ownership of individual buildings in university town-like urban settings rather than sprawling park-like lawns in which buildings are placed.
A number of university campuses or parts of campuses have been recognised as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO for their outstanding universal value. These include: