The Provincetown Playhouse, where Eugene O’Neill put on plays early in his career, may be torn down by New York U. (Photo by Seth Werkheiser)

New York University has a plan to demolish the Provincetown Playhouse, in Greenwich Village, a theater where Eugene O’Neill put on his first plays and where Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Paul Robeson, and Bette Davis once performed.

The demolition would be part of a plan to acquire and renovate six million square feet of space in the city, The New York Times reports. University officials emphasized that the demolition was merely a proposal, and that NYU would discuss the plan with neighbors and preservationists. An architect for the university said a new building on the site would more closely resemble the theater prior to a 1940s renovation that combined four...

Hope and perseverance: The president of Northern Illinois University, John G. Peters, announced Tuesday that the university would renovate Cole Hall, the building in which a gunman killed five students and himself in February. After the shootings, the university had planned to demolish the building, but reversed course after hearing from thousands of people in meetings and by e-mail, according to the Associated Press. Said Amy Genova, a graduate student who helped organize a group called Preserve NIU’s Cole Hall: “Honestly, I think the building represents more than the school realized initially. It represents hope and perseverance as well as sadness. Many of us will need to return to that building in order to get some kind of closure.”

Stanford U. is building a new home (left) for its medical school. (Stanford University rendering)

A new building, at last: A $90-million structure is...

Love it? Hate it? Either way, Modernist architecture — like Edward Durell Stone’s work at the State U. of New York at Albany — is an essential part of American architectural history. (Chronicle photo by Lawrence Biemiller)

Midcentury modern architecture certainly has its detractors. The architecture critic Catesby Leigh has been pushing his alma mater, Princeton University, to give up modern design and return to traditional forms. “Everyone — aside from most architects — is just coming around to the fact that traditional architecture works better than Modernist architecture,” he told the Yale University student newspaper recently. “Marci,” a frequent Buildings & Grounds commenter, never passes up an opportunity to slam Modernist architecture on this blog. “Modern architecture looks great until the morning,” she once

The California NanoSystems Institute at the U. of California at Los Angeles, designed by Rafael Viñoly, has crisscrossing ramps that provide opportunities for meetings and chance encounters. (U. of California at Los Angeles image)

Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for The Los Angeles Times, says that Rafael Viñoly’s new building for the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles is “one of the most compelling architectural set pieces in all of Los Angeles” — mainly for the way it uses a tricky site.

Mr. Hawthorne points out that UCLA is by far the most densely built of all the UC campuses — it has the smallest land area and the most square footage in buildings. Mr. Viñoly’s challenge was to create a space that would encourage...

The U. of Wisconsin at Madison plans to replace the 1968 Humanities Building, designed by the Chicago architect Harry Weese. (U. of Wisconsin at Madison image)

Erasing the 1960s from the campus map: Because so many buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are slated for demolition at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, future students may miss out on an entire era in the university’s architectural history, says Arnold Alanen, a professor of landscape architecture at the university. Modernist structures like the George L. Mosse Humanities Building were often poorly designed and poorly constructed, Mr. Alanen says in an article about the institution’s preservation dilemmas in The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper. That makes the Modernist structures less likely to be preserved than older, better-loved buildings, such as the university’s dairy barn and a gymnasium known as the Red Gym....

Old dormitories at the University of Colorado at Boulder are getting a $13-million facelift, as the university moves to a residential-college model, with professors and students living side by side, reports the Daily Camera. The dormitories will feature smart classrooms, so students can sit in courses within their living areas. And the buildings will have technology that controls the heating and cooling in the building, sensing when a window is cracked open.

People at the university believe that the new living arrangements will encourage the sort of serendipitous encounters between professor and student that lead to engaging discussion and learning. The residences will house honors students, and one professor said that he was excited about raising his children around college...

An L train emerges from the tube above the McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology. (Chronicle photograph)

Most architects and people who appreciate architecture are probably familiar with the story of a small town on the northern coast of Spain called Bilbao. Once an industrial city, Bilbao had little hope for economic development 20 years ago.

Everything changed, almost overnight, with the opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Anchored by this widely heralded building, the city has become an international travel destination and has enjoyed an economic renaissance. The term coined to describe this transformation is “Bilbao effect.”

Can something similar happen on a university campus?...

An expansion plan at North Carolina Central University calls for the purchase of about 140 homes and other properties around campus over the next 10 years, with the plan scheduled to built out by 2024. It has not been received well by some of the university’s neighbors, according to The News & Observer.

Carolyn Green Boone—the great-granddaughter of James E. Shepard, the university’s founder—told a crowd at a meeting that the expansion would harm historic neighborhoods and that critics had been ignored in the planning process. “We’re the founding family of this university and we feel totally disenfranchised,” she said.

The expansion plan includes new housing, a new stadium, a new library, parking ramps, and new facilities for some professional programs.

The News & Observer says that many re...

York Narrow Fabrics will become an engineering facility. (Photograph courtesy York College of Pennsylvania)

Here’s a case of adaptive reuse that even a bureaucrat could love: York College of Pennsylvania is refurbishing a manufacturing facility once owned by the York Narrow Fabrics Company, whose mainstay for decades was producing spools of red woven fabric — or “red tape” — used to wrap government documents. The building will become a home for the college’s engineering disciplines.

The plant, which sits adjacent York College’s campuses, produced a million yards of fabric tape every day during its years of operation, which ended two years ago. The fabric tape manufactured there, in various colors and widths, had innumerable uses, explains Carlton H. Stauffer, who was the longtime president of York Narrow Fabrics. It lined the insides of business suits and formed borders on...

Gina Crandell, one of this month’s guest bloggers, is visiting professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also principal of Gina Crandell Landscape Architecture, a Boston practice working with campuses and land trusts.

Trees in Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain (Photograph by Gina Crandell)

Why do Americans think of trees as individuals, even when they’re part of a group?

For example, Americans will replace trees in an allée one by one, as each tree dies—or, more likely, they won’t replace the dead trees, and the architectural structure of the allée will slowly degrade. And why do colleges designate single trees as memorials, rather than whole groves? (Fund raising for a grove could bring in much more money.) Why are there so many tree huggers in the U.S.? (Some have been living in trees at the University of...