The one thing everyone will tell you about Boston University is that it doesn’t have a campus. Walk through it and you are walking through the city — buildings sit between shops, apartments and traffic rather than behind a gate.
This paper treats that fragmentation as evidence rather than a shortcoming. Following the university through a sequence of maps, from the scattered points it occupied across Boston in the late nineteenth century to the Commonwealth Avenue corridor it holds now, it asks what the scatter says about how BU grew: a university founded to belong to the city, expanding by adapting the buildings already standing in it.
AH387: Boston Architecture & Urbanism · Professor Abramson · 7 May 2026
