<p>so i visited harvard this past weekend and i don't know if it was just me.....but the campus wasn't really what i expected. i know campus aesthetics have nothing to do with academics, but with the prestige that comes with harvard, were any of you surprised that the campus was not that pretty?</p>
<p>I’ve always been baffled at how ugly Harvard is…sure, it has a couple nice red brick buildings and the dining hall is straight out of Hogwarts, but the rest is so dreary, boring, and just plain unsightly. The campus almost seems to reinforce the depressed, uptight, lonely stereotype of Harvard students…</p>
<p>Just goes to show that prestige plays a much bigger role than some might think…no matter how ugly Harvard is, ITS HARVARD and so people overlook the campus, yet if it weren’t Harvard, everyone would be bashing it as a worthless, ugly school. At least Boston and Cambridge help soften the blow of a pitiful campus.</p>
<p>The funny thing is that dining hall is relatively new - in our day practically the only time you went in that room was for freshman mixers and to register for courses. I’m glad they’ve put it to better use. I never thought Harvard was particularly beautiful, but I’m not fond of red brick and the grass always seemed to get trampled. The courtyards of the houses for upperclassmen are lovely though, and nothing beats lying out on the banks of the Charles River in the spring.</p>
<p>Yes, the houses can be beautiful, and of course the river views…the majority of campus, however, is below average IMHO.</p>
<p>“Just goes to show that prestige plays a much bigger role than some might think” </p>
<p>… Or it goes to show that people have different conceptions of what makes a campus pretty or ugly. Really what’s more likely - that everyone thinks the campus is horrifically ugly and just sucks it up because “ITS HARVARD,” or that (like every other area of life) not everyone has the same taste as you?</p>
<p>I personally think the campus is lovely. The only time I really found it aesthetically unpleasant were the times of year when the grass hadn’t grown in yet, but the ground wasn’t covered by snow, so there were just lawns of dirt everywhere. But in terms of architecture, it was overall really nice and quaint.</p>
<p>Two things to understand about Harvard architecture:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It’s the Real Thing - It has an eclectic mixture of new and old styles, but the overall theme is New England Colonial red brick. It’s not faux-Gothic or imitation anything. Some of these buildings do in fact date back to the colonial era, and accordingly their architecture reflects the Plymouth Colony Puritan virtues of Truth, Beauty, and Simplicity. If Ornate is your idea of what a college campus needs to be, Harvard is not for you.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s what goes on INSIDE the buildings that make a college great. Looks are nice but it’s the quality of the scholarship that really counts. And Harvard offers scholarship of the very highest order. For an even more extreme example, think of MIT. Some of the top thinkers, teachers, and researchers on the planet work inside buildings that could look right at home on the campus of a mediocre state teachers college.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I love neo-Gothic but that didn’t stop me from clicking the accept button LOL :)</p>
<p>I agree that Yale is prettier than Harvard. I think a lot of people think Harvard will be as beautiful as it is prestigious, and it isn’t. I don’t think people necessarily are willing to overlook Harvard’s aesthetics because it’s Harvard. A lot of students recognize that there are schools prettier than Harvard, but still chose Harvard because looks was not their highest priority, and when weighing other factors, Harvard makes up for looks in other departments.</p>
<p>I like the way Harvard looks, but then I’ve always loved big cities, so I loved the fact that Harvard was smack dab in the middle of Cambridge. Never wanted to go to a gorgeous college in the middle of nowhere. Princeton, I suppose, is better looking, but there’s not that much to do in the city that it’s in, and NY is far enough away that one can’t just be there in 10 minutes like one can go from Harvard to Boston. Duke is gorgeous, but the city that it’s in isn’t big or particularly exciting.</p>
<p>Given the Harvard name and mystique, I’d guess that most first-time visitors may be underwhelmed by the architecture, which to me is OK but not dazzling. But then, colleges often go to great extents to dazzle people with architecture because their ability to attract students depends on it. At Harvard, I suppose the being competitive in the higher ed market isn’t architecture-dependent.</p>
<p>A lot of people have said this.</p>
<p>I don’t know. When I visited it, I thought it was absolutely amazing, although I may not have been quite as focused on the actual exteriors of most of the buildings.</p>
<p>In any case, if you’re looking to get an acceptance letter off your hands, call me…</p>
<p>Here’s one Old Blue who completely agrees with coureur. Harvard has always been my ideal of what a university campus should be. I love the mix of eclectic styles, the fact that every building, for better or worse, belongs to its time. I love the river houses. I far prefer it to Yale, always have. </p>
<p>And that didn’t stop me from going to Yale, because in the end your first impression of architectural facades doesn’t matter that much. It shouldn’t stop any of you from going to Harvard if that’s the right place for you. Trust me, you will come to love the campus plenty.</p>
<p>We love the way Harvard looks. Very traditional and English looking. The streets of Cambridge are beautiful and quaint. Harvard exceeded our expectations!</p>
<p>In terms of how beautiful the campuses are, how would you rank the 8 Ivy League schools, along with Stanford, Duke, and Northwestern?</p>
<p>can’t really agree with the OP but Yale’s campus is ****ing horrible and MIT’s pwns.</p>
<p>We loved Harvard’s campus and architecture, but we are from the West Coast, so red brick Colonial is unusual and refreshing to us. We find Stanford’s campus beige and boring with featureless landscaping, and Yale didn’t seem “real,” it felt like a Hollywood set, but we still liked it.</p>
<p>^^^ “In terms of how beautiful the campuses are, how would you rank the 8 Ivy League schools, along with Stanford, Duke, and Northwestern?”</p>
<p>Sounds like fun! First, you have to define your terms. Since campuses are a blend of their best parts, their worst parts, and their settings, I’ll give equal weight to the appeal of their best features (designated +), the lack of detriment from the least of their features (-), and their settings. The latter will be controversial - Yale and Penn people will say “No way, we’re just talking about the campuses here” while Northwestern and Cornell fans will say “How can you evaluate our campuses and ignore a waterfront view?” So you all can do it differently, but I’ll include the settings. All ratings on a 1 - 5 scale; I’ll break ties with my own subjective preferences.:</p>
<pre><code> University + - Setting Total
</code></pre>
<p>1 - Dartmouth 5 5 4 14
2 - Princeton 5 4 5 14
3 - Yale 5 5 2 12
4 - Stanford 5 4 3 12
5 - Cornell 4 3 5 12
6 - Duke 5 3 3 11
7 - Harvard 4 2 5 11
8 - Northwestern 4 1 5 10
9 - Penn 5 3 1 9
10 - Brown 4 2 3 9
11 - Columbia 4 2 3 9</p>
<p>Have at it!</p>
<p>Yes, fun, except I’ve never seen Duke or Northwestern. (And anyway, they go to the bottom of my list because I’ve never thought that I was missing anything important by not visiting them.)</p>
<p>gadad and I clearly exist in universes that only partially overlap. I refuse to do the whole numbers thing, though. My ranked list:</p>
<p>Harvard – the real deal in a vibrant urban setting
Princeton – the most beautiful self-contained campus
Cornell – beautiful self-contained campus on steroids, with major drama
(gap)
Yale – the fake deal in a non-vibrant urban setting, but it works pretty well
(big gap)
Stanford – the beautiful self-contained campus on prozac. Can we play through?
Columbia – the beautiful self-contained campus on steroids in a vibrant urban setting, but a little claustrophobic and way too high above street level - wrong message
Penn – kind of a mess, but great location relative to the city, and some of the buildings, especially the oldest and newest ones, are superb (and some really bite)
Brown – yawn, but at least there’s something of a city there and you can get there on public transportation pretty easily
Dartmouth – wake me up when we get home</p>
<p>Well JHS, your universe is an urban one, mine’s a rural one, and they appear to overlap somewhere in the suburbs (Princeton) 
. Northwestern’s really interesting - it’s on the western shore of Lake Michigan with Chicago shimmering in the distance, 12 miles away across the water - spectacular. Then, the South Campus houses most of the arts and humanities and is a beautiful, leafy park-like setting, though it lacks any focal point - there’s no one view or building that’s the “face” of the campus the way the Yard is at Harvard or Old Nassau is at Princeton. And attached to the South Campus is the North Campus which houses engineering and the sciences - a post-modern horror of ghastly, stark white block buildings with an industrial vibe. Kind of like receiving electrical shocks while eating ambrosia and drinking nectar.</p>
<p>I suspect many people affiliated with Northwestern would say that University Hall is the closest thing to the building that is the “face” of the campus. <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Hall_(Northwestern_University)[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Hall_(Northwestern_University)</a> The area around that, plus the sorority quads, remind me somewhat – somewhat – of the feel of Princeton, as well as the proximity to easily-walkable shopping, dining, etc. </p>
<p>Having said that, you’re correct in that there is no Yard or Square area that really serves as a center point the way you have in other campuses. </p>
<p>It also makes me wonder how much of one’s attachment to a campus is a function of the physical beauty and how much is just a function of being young and feeling the world is your oyster … KWIM?</p>