Frist Campus Center

• 1. Introduction

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  Frist Campus Center draws much of Princeton University's social life to a single address. Room 302, a lecture hall within its walls, has been restored to exactly the state it held when Albert Einstein once lectured there. That room points toward a history the building's sociable present tends to obscure. What was this structure before it became a student center? Whose fortune funded the change? The firm eventually chosen to design the transformation had a direct and personal connection to Princeton itself.

• 2. A Hospital Fortune

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  Palmer Physics Lab stood at the address that Frist Campus Center now holds. Before the transformation, the building's occupants were physicists, not students gathering between lectures. The Frist family provided the endowment that changed its identity entirely. Their fortune came from the private hospital business, a world distant in character from the Collegiate Gothic walls they were funding. Designing the transformation fell to a firm with an unusual qualification: one of its principals had graduated from Princeton himself.

• 3. An Alumnus Returns

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  Robert Venturi, one of the principals of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, is a Princeton alumnus. That detail gave the commission a particular character: a graduate returning to reshape a building at his own university. Venturi worked with his partner Denise Scott Brown on a design shaped by Palmer Hall's unusual geometry. The structure was C-shaped, with an interior courtyard and one side left open. New construction filled the courtyard while a further extension closed the open side, creating the building's new east facade. When the addition was completed in 2001, the building presented a continuous form where there had once been an open gap. The exterior that Venturi and Scott Brown created would later serve an entirely unexpected purpose.

• 4. On Screen

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  Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, the fictional setting of the television drama House, has no physical existence. The exterior that represents it on screen belongs to Frist Campus Center. The real building lent its Gothic exterior to a drama set within a fictional version of the university it actually serves.

  James Bradberry Architects undertook a thorough renovation of the building's 100 level in 2008 and 2009. That work updated a portion of the campus center that the original construction had left in its earlier form. When House needed to show Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, it showed Princeton's real campus center instead.