Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung, 41. Jahrgang, 1/2019 24 Forschungsartikel Concepts of campus design and estate management: case studies from the United Kingdom and Switzerland Susan Harris-Huemmert Many higher education institutions are ancient and have been altered, expanded, changed in architectural terms over centuries. Others are extremely young and have been built as whole concepts from scratch. What unites them all, whether old or more recent, is that they are places of debate, experiment, creativity and learning. Research, teaching and learning are usually united in one or more sites, all of which need main- taining and should ideally enable teaching, learning and research processes to work in the best manner possible. This paper discusses concepts of campus design and how higher education estate is being managed in three different institutions. 1 Introduction The university is an ancient and successful concept which, until very recently, has usually been associated with a particular locus, at a single, fairly homogenous site, or as a collection of buildings in a town or city. Some universities such as the University of Lausanne which was relocated from its former city centre location to Dorigny on the outskirts, have been planned in their entirety from predominantly one architectural drawing board. Some have started out with one central axis of teaching and learning spaces, which have been expanded over time and by different architects e. g. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The University of Oxford started out as a small locus of students and their teachers which would grow over the centuries into nearly 40 colleges, a Science Area, university hospitals etc. The three above-named institu- tions will form the main area of interest in this paper. Architectural trends have played major parts in much university construction – e. g. neo-Gothic (19th century), Classicist (19th century), or Modernist (20th century). They have all involved university leaders, planners, financiers (through state coffers or private donations), constructors, architects and end users. Regardless of style, university buildings are loaded with meaning and, as is the case with buildings for other purposes, influence our wellbeing (Lockwood, 1972). Our surroundings, which are not fixed, change to become objects of “(re)interpretation, narration and representation […]” (Gieryn, 2002, p.35). This is a sense-making process as we negotiate how to act within them (Weick, 1995). Buildings impact on our well-being and how we thrive, which should be of key importance to the academic world in which creativity and innovation