Changing demographics. Market competition. Aging infrastructure. World-shrinking, mind-expanding technology. Environmental impacts. The college and university campus is at a crossroads. On September 14, 2006 Landscape Forms brought together twenty-four professionals including architects, landscape architects, campus planners and educational administrators to discuss these and other key issues in campus planning. The meeting in Kalamazoo, Michigan was moderated by Metropolis magazine Editor in Chief Susan S. Szenasy.

There was general agreement among participants about the challenges. Student populations are increasingly diverse in ethnicity, language, economic status and age, and this has profound implications for the creation of campus identity and community. Student recruitment and retention are big issues for the bottom line (29% of all college students transfer) and the campus is an important tool for being competitive and building brand. Technology is essential and it’s everywhere. It has contributed to the evolution of the campus from teaching environment to learning environment — a seismic shift in work styles and expectations. Existing campus architecture and planning often fail to support today’s educational objectives and realities. Some iconic, donor-driven buildings erected on campuses a half-century ago are of less value to the mission of the institution now than the space they occupy. The allocation of up to 40% of land area to parking, made by many campuses in the interests of convenience, is proving to be a poor investment in institutional culture and an environmental liability to boot.

Roundtable participants talked about their points of view, experiences and approaches to these challenges in planningand design for the campus environment.

Students’ identification with the institution and with each other is essential to recruitment, retention and learning. What is it about a campus that lends it a strong identity and promotes a sense of shared experience and values? A few participants cited a sense of the past. Barry Anderson, ASLA, Campus Landscape Architect at Clemson University and a former student at the 1889 land grant institution, explained, “When I was looking for a college to attend, I was attracted to Clemson because it was a place that conveyed a sense of purpose beyond my years. It’s important that a place have a clear sense of where it’s been, where it is and where it’s going.” Several contributors reflected on the importance of symbols of inclusion or rites of passage on campus, such as the hallowed gates at Brown.

Others pointed to the expression of unique locality: the topography, climate, cultural traditions and the natural colors and textures of a place. David Motzenbecker, ASLA, of oslund.and.assoc in Minneapolis explained, “The identity of the place depends on so much more than physical attributes. It depends on intangible pieces and how those are realized — the values of the institution and the specific qualities unique to the locale. “But,” he questioned, “how do you create place when your whole campus is parking lots?”

Architect Paul Broches, FAIA, Principal of Mitchell-Guirgola in New York and Andrew Wilson, CSLA, Campus Planner at York University in Toronto offered another perspective.

Broches, who leads his firms’ work at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, observed, “There is a corollary to the issue of the past and a sense of history. Some of us are dealing with campuses that have many immigrants as students – and they may be the first generation of their family to attend college. They take education very seriously as leverage for the future. They’re looking for a launching pad and the sense of identity the school can provide is through access – to information, to the college community, and to contact with the larger world.”

Andrew Wilson added, “I think we have to be very careful when we start talking about bringing the history of an institution forward. We should be asking ourselves what that history is and the legitimacy of it. Building a gate to bring students into the idea of the university may be something that you think is appropriate but may have nothing to do with their life experience. Some of the students attend York specifically because, unlike the other major university in the city that has a longer history, York University is trying to build its identity on its programs and its interdisciplinary nature rather than tradition or history expressed in built form.”

Students find identity in relationship with others. Carol Thunstrom, Manager, Office of the Assistant Vice Chancellor, Auxiliary & Plant Services at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) reported, “When we asked students we found that identity was about socialization rather than architecture.” She and participants from other institutions reported strong student demand for places, especially outdoor places, where they can meet and interact. Contrary to fears that diversity and technology on campus promote distancing and isolation, Dr. Phyllis Grummon, Director of Planning & Education at the Society for College and University Planning pointed to signs that fragmentation and disconnection are not preferred states. “Individuals are expressing identity and longing for community,” she asserted. “That’s what Facebook and MySpace are all about.”

Indeed, Gary Brown, FASLA, Director, Campus Planning & Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin reported that when the university administration consulted with the student board about the first new residence hall to be built on campus in 40 years, it learned that instead of apartment-style buildings, students wanted dormitory style rooms. Yes, they wanted bigger rooms with walk-in closets and plenty of technology support. But they preferred restroom facilities in the hallways (albeit smaller and more numerous than in the old gang shower model) to get students out of their rooms. And big dining halls down the street, rather than cooking facilities in the rooms, so students would be encouraged to gather and eat as a social experience.

Planners at the University of Arizona recognized the importance of social connection in forging identity and decreasing turnover among new students and created a facility for freshmen in the center of campus called the Integrated Learning Center. The building is organized around a central courtyard and includes multimedia lecture halls, discussion rooms and lounges with full Internet access, a computer commons that connects to the library and a series of rooms for student teams working together on projects. Mark Novak, ASLA, landscape architect at the university reported, “It’s a place where freshmen can interact both inside and outside the classroom and become oriented to a large, complex environment. It has been in operation for five years and has proven quite successful in increasing retention.”

Carol Thunstrom suggested that simply observing student behavior can lead to good solutions. “As planners, if you look at where students congregate and you develop those areas, you almost always end up with identity and place without even trying.” Moderator Susan Szenasy agreed. “These pockets of energy should be studied by the teams designing for these places. We need more rigorous observational research.”

Many of the tenets of new urbanism are being incorporated into campus plans: reducing distances between destinations to enable walking; rethinking the centrality of the car on campus; increasing density at critical cores; multiplying settings for serendipitous and planned meetings. Participants expressed appreciation of new urbanism as a model for placemaking.

John Burse, AIA, of Mackey Mitchell Associates in St. Louis summed it up. “Neo-traditionalist planning has really succeeded at the creation of places that have pedestrian scale, charm, delight, dignity. A lot of what we’re seeing in our work on college campuses today is about reversing the placelessness that modernist planning created. The object towers in the field. It’s not about a single element. It’s about the whole ensemble, all the buildings and the landscape really working in unison to create a sense of place.”

On campuses with historic districts, surveys often reveal student preference for those areas. That was the case at the University of Texas. But David Rea, University of Texas at Austin Master Architect and Director of Facilities Management said it’s the nature of the spaces, not their history that makes them so popular. “The older 1930s part of the campus has a much more human scale. It’s only 10% of the campus, but people identify with it. So our Pelli master plan started from and tried to build on that.”

Mark Novak, ASLA, University of Arizona concurred. The survey conducted for the university’s Tucson campus plan showed the same kind of results. The historic district buildings and spaces were more popular. “But when we looked at the characteristics or qualities that students related to, it was the communal spaces formed by buildings and the fact that the buildings had some visual consistency. The entryways were human scale. And the area has a series of linked, open spaces with comfortable places to sit and mature vegetation that people use and enjoy for large and small gatherings,” he explained. “We’re trying to take those qualities into the new plan, not to replicate the old historic campus, but to use buildings to form spaces and consider how new buildings can contribute to and reinforce the sense of campus community.”

John Burse lauded the adoption of new urbanist approaches to parking in campus plans. “A lot of new urbanist developments are aligning parking garages with buildings that have mixed use and that adds to street life. If you go to Ohio State today you see a redefined entrance to the campus and a mix of building types that include parking garages with liner buildings around them that deepen the sense of urbanism and the street life vitality around the campus.”

Paul Broches pointed out that campuses located in colder climates, where students can’t spend most of the year outdoors, have to find ways to create interior spaces that provide potentialities for community. “It requires a more sophisticated sense of how you design buildings,” he explained. “They may actually begin looking more in plan like good landscapes. So if we translate our thinking about the larger scale of a good village to the building as village, we’ll get a rewarding relationship between the indoor and outdoor aspects of the built community.”

Participants cited multi-disciplinary collaboration and university/civic partnerships as key aspects of a successful campus planning process. “If we look at the multi-disciplinary way new urbanists work we see that you get a better product when architects, landscape architects, and engineers all work toward a common goal,” insisted Jack La Quatra, landscape architect and Principal, LaQuatra Bonci Associates. “One of the biggest issues confronting us is that a multidisciplinary approach is not taken often enough.”

Some universities have assumed the lead in the collaboration with local communities. Barbara Ryder, RLA, AICP, Office of Capital Planning and Development at Washington State University described the setting of her 18,000-student campus as “a small hill town” in which the university and community are closely bound. “We’ve been the ones going out and networking with the city supervisor, doing real estate deals, trying to build private-public partnerships, trying to enhance the character of the town. So we’re not just creating a university identity but a whole package – a town community where students live in the neighborhoods, learn how to become better citizens and gain a sense of stewardship about the community.”

Doug Kozma, RLA, ASLA of JJR in Ann Arbor pointed to a weakness he observes in new urbanist work. “The new urbanist approach hasn’t applied the notion of natural systems as thoughtfully as it could,” he lamented. “The campus is a beautiful opportunity to weave the environment and the natural systems into an urban environment and that’s one of the greater challenges that we face as we take that movement forward.”

Technology has been a primary driver in the transformation of the campus from teaching environment to learning environment. It has altered the way classes are conducted, enabled more collaborative learning, changed the interface between faculty and students. Susan Szenasy, who has been teaching design history in New York City for almost 20 years, explained “I haven’t been able to lecture for the past 10 years because the kids just won’t listen. Education is more about how they interact with one another and how they learn from things other than their teachers. Teachers are more facilitators now and our role is to help students think things through and give them guidance.”

On many campuses, courses are offered in a combination of face-to-face and online classes. Jeanne LaMontagne, University of Houston Architect, Facilities Planning & Construction reported that on her campus these classes have been “a win on every level: faculty, student and facility.” Retention has increased and there’s a greater sense of community. She was not alone is chalking this up to the fact that students are more comfortable communicating electronically with each other and with their professors. And she added, “Professors have found that they have more time to engage students with the flexibility of the electronic medium.”

Wireless technology can be a boon to campus planning. Carol Thunstrom explained, “At UCSD we’re going wireless and find it much easier from a planning perspective to set up areas that are computer friendly. Students bring their laptops wherever they are.”

Technology-based change is particularly apparent in the library, where, on many campuses, the new model is the cyber café. For Paul Broches, that’s just fine. “The library is about more than hard cover books. It’s about technology and facilitating information interchange,” he declared. “It is an information resource center with many media, the intellectual hub of the institution. It should be transparent and perforated. In a literal sense – glass, not brick. The insides of buildings connected to the outdoors. Furniture that you use inside and out. Architecture, which has sometimes been an obstacle, should become the permeable device that facilitates all of these interactions. Then the teaching component can be more about socialization and less about the “sage on the stage.” And that will enrich the education process.”

The roundtable concluded with a discussion of some specific campus sustainability projects. Evie Asken, FAIA, FAUA, Director of Campus Planning, Western Michigan University described the school’s new College of Engineering, a 220-acre development in a former cornfield, the design of which was driven by storm water management requirements. On campus, deer, coyotes, pheasant and naturalized plantings share an accessible and transparent environment with students and faculty. The open approach was extended to the buildings as well. “We made as many of the mechanical systems and connections visible as possible,” she reported. “And all of the labs are open so students can share experiences.”

Jack La Quatra’s firm put together the team that planned and designed a benchmark building at Penn State that houses a program for integrated architecture and landscape architecture education. “The building was a coordinated effort between architects, engineers, landscape architects,” he explained. “It has a LEED gold rating, includes bio-remediation, and the whole thing works to create people spaces. When you’re in the building you feel like you’re outside. It’s a great case study and will be an incubator for sustainable campus architecture and integrated education.”

Andrew Wilson described possible projects at Toronto’s York University in which stories about people’s experiences in particular places on campus are recorded, and natural forms and built objects are radio frequency tagged. As people walk through the campus they could access the stories and tagged information via cell phones or Blackberries. “It would be a virtual environment overlaying the campus,” he explained “in which physical sustainability and cultural sustainability go hand in hand.”

Finally, Susan Szenasy put the discussion in a larger context. “When we use the word sustainability we are talking about a re-shifting of our priorities from a kind of machine-centered, corporate-centered, abstraction-centered world to reconnecting with nature and with the technologies that aid us to do that. It’s a long-term process — a whole new way of designing and using land and products. We are redesigning the design process itself. This connectivity between technology, the natural world and the built environment represents a larger, systems way of thinking about something that is bigger than a single place, or building or room. And it is very hopeful.”