[5] The tradition of a campus began with the medieval European universities where the students and teachers lived and worked together in a cloistered environment.
[6] The notion of the importance of the setting to academic life later migrated to America, and early colonial educational institutions were based on the Scottish and English collegiate system.
Early colonial colleges were all built in proprietary styles, with some contained in single buildings, such as the campus of Princeton University or arranged in a version of the cloister reflecting American values, such as Harvard's.
[7] Both the campus designs and the architecture of colleges throughout the country have evolved in response to trends in the broader world,[8][9] with most representing several different contemporary and historical styles and arrangements.
[11] In the early 1990s the term began to be used to describe a company's office building complex, most notably when Apple's Infinite Loop campus was first built, which at the time was exclusively for research and development.