Category Archives: Campus Planning and Design

Preserving what?

Posted on by

While they continue at full speed, higher education institutions face the challenge of remaking themselves.  In the coming years this will shift from cosmetic tweaking to preserving the best and losing the rest.

It is difficult to identify those ‘best’ characteristics without sounding nostalgic and all rah-rah.  Perhaps everyone can identify a few special conversations with a mentor who has influenced our lives, moments of insight that have dotted our academic careers, and enriching experiences that we have shared with classmates or colleagues.  Until quite recently these events always happened in a specific place and ‘real time.’  It may not always be so. Continue reading →

Space or Place

Posted on by

Conflicting perspectives are at the core of every decision about the campus.  Is it a space or place?

Space is the domain of the facilities officers, the real estate managers.  Place is the domain of the participants, the users.  As the waves of fiscal and technological disruption wash over every corner of higher education cognitive dissonance will increase.

The Right Campus – For the facilities manager having the right campus is a question of resources and efficiencies:  minimizing operating costs per square foot, maximizing occupancy of classroom seats and eliminating under-utilized building area.  For the participants it is a question of preferences and performance:  reading in one’s own office or favorite study spot, effective learning and research environments, and convenient parking and transportation. Continue reading →

Faculty Office – Part 1

Posted on by

Office rectangle.square
The faculty office is the third rail of university facilities planning.  It is heresy to say that all faculty members do not need a private office.  Parking is the only aspect of campus life that’s more contentious.

Truth is all faculty members do not need private offices, but not all faculty work can be done in open office environments.  There’s the rub.

Many will believe this to be heresy, just as did most who commented on Lawrence Biemiller’s article “Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices” [Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2010].  He speculated on the advantages of open offices, and some of the comments called the writer’s intelligence into question and others attacked institutional “bean counters” for daring to challenge the hereditary rights of the faculty. Continue reading →

Studying Alone

Posted on by

The irreplaceable value of campuses lies in building community.  Without that they will gradually become hollow shells.

Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone about the decline of community involvement over the last 50 years, including the demise of many civic organizations and bowling alleys that once were common fixtures of American life.  He documented waves of technological change from television to two-earner households, and the fraying of community activities.

Perhaps the college campus is the vanishing bowling alley of the 21st century.  Many have documented the waves of technological change from Internet to MITx and Udacity, and the lone student at laptop is a common image. Continue reading →

Different Bricks

Posted on by

The shifts being felt by colleges and universities are not limited to evolving educational technology.  The challenges to higher education include threats to business models, questions of legitimacy, and doubts about cost effectiveness.  Even if the promise of digital transformation is overstated, the consequences of the changing context will require campuses to adapt as rapidly as they ever have.

The bricks will need to be different, and in most cases fewer bricks will be needed. Continue reading →

Center of the Diagram

Posted on by

When English colleges were being developed, first at Oxford and shortly thereafter at Cambridge, the chapel was at the center of the diagram. The cultures of these institutions were only slightly removed from the monasteries of the Middle Ages.  It was in such cloistered setting that teaching and scholarship had been maintained through the aegis of the Church.

At Oxford and Cambridge, the chapel and its schedule of worship continued to be central to the life of each college. And so it continued for more than 300 years. By the early 1800s it was possible for Thomas Jefferson to conceive a new American university in Charlottesville in which the library took over the center of the diagram. It was there that the essential role of books and the printed page became the symbolic heart of the university.

Continue reading →

Once Upon a Time at a Midwestern University

Posted on by


Once when I met with a group of university architects from Canada and the US, we marveled at the beauty of the campus and the apparent coherence of the values that had shaped its design for more than a century.

The campus had come through the middle decades of twentieth century without either the brutalism or simplistic excesses of modernism.  Historic spaces had been preserved and strengthened.  Scale had been respected.  Connections had been maintained and improved.  All in all it was a place that showed the effects of care and deep stewardship over an extended period of time.

Continue reading →