<p>
</p>
<p>Not to mention Smith Walk, Hamilton Walk, the Biopond, Fisher Fine Arts Library, the University Museum, . . . .</p>
<p>Yale is incredible. (Great architecture, exciting yet managable city)
Princeton is the totally package. (Beautiful town, nice buildings, nice landscape.)
Columbia is by far the nicest campus in the greatest city in the nation, maybe on earth.
Dartmouth has a classic "college look" but verges on boring.
Brown lacks cohesion but it works, theres a nice mix of different styles.
Cornell lacks cohesion and it doesn't work. There are some really nice buildings and some pretty terrible ones. And it's grey 90% of the time.
Never seen Penn and saw Harvard too long ago to really judge.</p>
<p>Rankings with explanations:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Princeton: Total package. Pretty, awesome architecture, great combo of a beautiful town with plenty of nature. Feels like a really nice country club.</p></li>
<li><p>Dartmouth: Nice dorms, beautiful green spaces, access to a river. the outdoors (bema, occum pond) interdispersed among a quaint, new england, campus. Starry nights. </p></li>
<li><p>Harvard: Nice buildings, nice area. Nice. Not amazing, but nice. Lots of red brick.</p></li>
<li><p>Brown: Spread all over the place, but quaint and nice. Nice area of town. Sort of feels like Harvard, with browner bricks.</p></li>
<li><p>Yale: Nice at times, but dingy city and "okay" dorms dilute experience. Gothic is cool, but New Haven dilutes it.</p></li>
<li><p>Cornell: Beautiful nature, but buildings lack cohesion. </p></li>
<li><p>Columbia: Old dorms (McBain, Wein, Carman- Yuck!), lots of pavement, very little green space. Impressive, but not beautiful in my opinion.</p></li>
<li><p>Penn. Older buildings, urban area is "okay," not as cohesive as other Ivies.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Bump Yale from #5 to #1 and I'll go along with Slipper.</p>
<p>slipper, have you spent much time exploring Penn's campus on foot? To me, it has a much more cohesive and classic campus feel than Brown, Columbia, or Harvard (i.e., more self-contained with more shaded walkways, greens, plazas, and courtyards closed off from vehicular traffic).</p>
<p>i agree. in fact the thing i loved most about penn was how unified the campus is. it has beautiful old buildings but you can cross a street and be in the middle of a city. still, the campus is really self contained, not spread around cambridge like harvard's. i cant speak about the rest of the ivies but since i wouldnt want to live in princeton, new haven, new hampshire, or ithaca, penn's campus is the only one that appeals to me. i think harvard is ok (tho i havent been there in like 10 years) and i might like columbia but idk</p>
<p>YALE! gorgeous gothic architecture!</p>
<p>I went to Penn 10 years ago. Its likely that its improved a lot. I was turned off by the quality of the city at that time.</p>
<p>It's interesting how Cornell's lack of cohesion is a defining quality of both its architecture and its programs, making it great in its own right yet much derided by people that desire a more easily categorized package, be it architecturally or programmatically.</p>
<p>I guess I find a dynamic beauty that others do not in a modernist I.M. Pei museum juxtaposed against gorgeous classic gothic architecture all overlooking a beautiful rolling Finger Lake landscape with deep gorges cut by raging waterfalls running through campus.</p>
<p>I don't think Cornell's lack of cohesion is a bad thing. From modernist libraries to baroque chapels, sweeping vistas to enclosed courtyards, every turn is a stimulation to the senses. </p>
<p>I would think it would get monotonous being surrounded by the same collegiate Gothic all the time, as at Yale and Princeton. When I studied at Oxford, one of the nicer features was that the architectural styles were rather distinct across the colleges.</p>
<p>From the beginning, the founders of Cornell always felt that the buildings should reflect the thinking of the times. It's part of the intrinsic vibe to Cornell, and is what make it so very different from the other seven schools.</p>
<p>it's a matter of subjective taste but they are all very beautiful
this video chooses to highlight to beauty of the ivy league by featuring brown, princeton, columbia, harvard, and yale</p>
<p>Ivy</a> League Colleges</p>
<p>
Indeed. The Penn campus, its surrounding neighborhood, and Center City Philadelphia have all improved tremendously in the past decade and continue to improve even more, as widely reported in the national media:</p>
<p>Urban</a> Colleges Learn to Be Good Neighbors</p>
<p>Colleges</a> Teach 'Urban Development 101' - WSJ.com</p>
<p>Next</a> Great City: Philly, Really @ National Geographic Traveler</p>
<p>Five pages detailing the massive redevelopment of Penn's campus in the late 1990s:</p>
<ol>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
</ol>
<p>have any of you that aren't putting dartmouth in the top 2 or 3 visited? that campus is incredibly pretty</p>
<p>Dartmouth has a nice campus, but all 8 schools have such nice campuses that it's kind of like splitting hairs.</p>
<p>^ and also depends greatly on personal taste and preference.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I went to Penn 10 years ago. Its likely that its improved a lot. I was turned off by the quality of the city at that time.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Too true. In between 1998 and now there has been a lot of work done on the Penn campus and in the surrounding neighborhood (both in directed development efforts and as a natural side-effect of gentrification)</p>
<p>Agree with above. I last saw penn about 10 years ago and didn't think particularly highly of the campus. However, after seeing it recently there have definitely been lots of improvements. (Incidentally, this is also true of MIT--MIT was awful 10 years ago, and is amazing now).</p>
<p>IMHO, Princeton is one of the prettiest places in the world with buildings. Princeton in May/June is so pretty that when alums come back for reunions, it is easy to get them to open up their checkbooks.</p>
<p>If one is tempted by greenery, I suspect Cornell and Dartmouth come next.
If one is tempted more by architecture, maybe Yale rises in the rankings.</p>
<p>In the one year when I visited all of them, Princeton dominated the visual comparison.</p>
<p>From the ones I've seen:</p>
<p>Dartmouth
Penn
Cornell
Harvard</p>