| Harvard’s 1st year dining hall, Annenberg, is pretty magnificent - they aren’t taking you inside on the tours |
| Obviously, very subjective. UVA feels like the perfect college campus, and love the beauty of the area. Touring on a fall day made me long to go to college again. Others I love are UCLA and Tulane. |
The Rotunda and Lawn are beautiful, but the rest of Grounds is blah. Plus, Charlottesville is on an ugly apartment building boom that is ruining the aesthetic of a small southern town. Boo to the planners and developers! |
| I am well aware that it's not a highly rnaked school by any means, but Hood College is Frederick Maryland is a gorgeous campus. I think it might be prettier in the spring than fall. There's a pergola in the middle of residence quad that is covered in wisteria, the grass lawns are beautiful, the buildings are classic brick with white columns. Truly just a pretty little jewel of a campus. |
Charlottesville and UVA are at odds. Charlottesville thinks UVA bears responsibility for high housing costs and stagnant tax base so they have approved high rise apartments adjacent to the grounds that UVA strongly opposed. |
The style of apartment buildings they are building there are so ugly. They have the same style near Del Ray, DC, and I see them all over the US. Is it because they can put them up quickly? Why don’t they make them pretty?? |
| Havent been to VT… how does that college compare ? |
It is a nice campus and I know the alums think it is pretty. These days you can pretty much do a virtual tour. |
I've visited Harvard a few times and I am always underwhelmed with the campus. I did get to check out the renovated Museum which was very impressive and spectacular but the overall campus has never done it for me. |
| Michigan |
The Verve student apartment building adjacent to the Engineering school is 12 stories and enormous. It is a new direction for anything in such close proximity to UVA. I'll see what it looks like when complete. |
It must be Cambridge, MA. If you look at Harvard's closest global competitors, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge University, all are generally renowned for campus beauty except for Harvard and MIT. |
| CU Boulder is beautiful and has a great setting. U Washington is great on nice clear days. Wellesley, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Scripps and U San Diego are all great smaller schools. Yale has great and notable architecture. |
I thought VT was very nice and nicer than I'd expected. There's a lot of Gothic architecture, with newer buildings typically (perhaps always) using the same local "Hokie Stone." There's a large central green space in the center of campus, and it's very large compared to what you find at most campuses. It gives the school a military feel, and that appeals to some and not to others. |
And Harvard has only had about 400 years to do something about it. But its origins are as a Puritan school, which didn’t really value aesthetics. And no one subsequently wanted to change that. So it remains a very plain school. I think generally, universities that did their most substantial building in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are the most pleasing to the eye today. |