Fodor's Expert Review Arizona State University

What began in 1886 as the Tempe Normal School for Teachers, a four-room redbrick building and 20-acre cow pasture, is now the 750-acre Tempe campus of ASU, the largest university in the Southwest. The university has five campuses across the Valley, with the Tempe campus serving as headquarters. As you walk around campus, you'll wind past public art and innovative architecture—including a music building that bears a strong resemblance to a wedding cake, designed by Taliesin students to echo Frank Lloyd Wright's Gammage Auditorium, and a law library shaped like an open book—and end up at Sun Devil Stadium, which is carved out of a mountain and cradled between the Tempe buttes.