Interview Report Campus design is an art consisting of multiple and overlapping designs like determining the locations of teaching buildings, residence halls and so on. As a landscape architecture student, I am interested in this topic. I interviewed professor David Michael Barbarash, who is an assistant professor of landscape architecture in Purdue University. Prof. Barbarash earned a bachelor’s of landscape architecture from Virginia Tech and a master of science from the department of landscape architecture at State University of New York Environmental School of Forestry. Before he came
to Purdue, he worked in design firms from NYC and Washington D.C where he did a lot of different types of landscape designs including campus design. The day I interviewed Prof. Barbarash was a nice day with warm sunshine and blooming flowers everywhere, Purdue campus seemed to wake up from the dead winter. Nice weather leads to a nice mood, as does a nice campus design. When I asked Prof. Barbarash how Virginia Tech campus influenced his study life, he smiled and shared his story with me happily. He said the first time he walked around in Virginia Tech, he just fell in love with it and noticed that this place was the very place he wanted to go without even learning about the programs. He thought the campus just felt right to him. It had a consistent style, a great level of public students’ space from big wide open areas to little shelter private gathering areas. These were all what he thought a college should be like. From his point of view, campus landscape really has an unimaginable effect on students’ lives. Prof. Barbarash did some campus design project when he was working for design
firms. When I asked the key points when designing a campus, he thought a few seconds and figured out two main points which were a sense of scale and a sense of place. He explained that a sense of scale should bring comforts to people, for example, a sense of enclosure enough to