The environment of a university - what we term a campus - is a place with special resonance. They have long been the setting for some of history's most exciting experiments in the design of the built environment. Christopher Wren at Cambridge, Le Corbusier at Harvard, and Norman Foster at the Free University Berlin: the calibre of practitioners who have shaped the physical realm of academia is superlative.

Pioneering architecture and innovative planning make for vivid assertions of academic excellence, while the physical estate of a university can shape the learning experiences and...