Speaking of bathrooms, today is your last day to vote in this year’s America’s Best Restroom competition. Two very nifty restrooms on the lower level of Smith College’s Brown Fine Arts Center are in the running.

The restrooms were designed for the building by artists—Ellen Driscoll did the women’s room and Sandy Skoglund, a Smith alumna, did the men’s room. The restrooms opened in 2003, after the building was renovated and expanded by Polshek Partnership Architects.

“When it was completed in 1894, St. Louis Hall stood alone at the end of a horse and buggy trail that connected the school to the last stop of the West End Electric Street Car Company a mile to the east,” says a press release from St. Mary’s U. The building was added to the U.S. National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places. (Photo courtesy St. Mary’s U.)

Frat-fall: A 70-year-old fraternity house at the University of Georgia will be demolished within a month, and other frat houses may follow, as the university has plans to construct academic buildings in their place, reports the Athens Banner-Herald. The brothers of Kappa Alpha were the first to move out of their house this week. The university...

Bathroom pods are being delivered to a construction site at Rice U. as a self-contained unit, which might cut costs and waste. (Images courtesy of Rice U., Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company, and Hopkins Architects)

Bathrooms attract their share of attention in the design world, especially in shelter magazines, but the bathrooms in new residential buildings at Rice University are something different altogether. The McMurtry & Duncan Colleges will feature “bathroom pods,” prefabricated toilet, shower, and sink units designed by the project’s architects, Hopkins Architects and Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company.

The main advantages of the bathroom pods are efficiency and reduction of waste. A

Among venues for next month’s Olympic Games is a new gymnasium at Beijing Science and Technology University. (Images from the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad)

The Olympics may inconvenience students who get sent home from Beijing’s universities for the duration of the competition. But after the Games end, students at a number of institutions will enjoy new athletics facilities built for the occasion.

Peking University, for instance, has a new 290,000-square-foot gymnasium that will serve as the table-tennis venue during the Games, seating 7,557...

The Columbus Dispatch reports that Otterbein College is suing the Department of Defense over the clean up — or lack thereof — of land given to the college in 1962.

The 111-acre tract was a munitions facility during World War II, and the complaint says that the college has found artillery rounds and even radioactive materials on the site. At one time the college had wanted to sell the land, but could not because of the contamination. Now the college wants to use the land for its horse-science program.

The Dispatch says the college accepted the donation decades ago on the condition that the military would clean it, the report says.

Green news abounds this week. First off, The New York Times features a story about greening colleges and the Princeton Review’s sustainability ratings. (A Chronicle article raised questions about those ratings, and the Times article touches on the issue, too.) A number of colleges will announce their presence on the rating system’s “honor roll” this afternoon.

Colorado State University has established its School of Global Environmental Sustainability, which should start offering classes in 2010. Diana Wall, a well-known environmental researcher who has been...

Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain (Photo by Alan Ward)

Last October the American Society of Landscape Architects gave Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain its coveted Landmark Award. The award, given jointly with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is noteworthy not only because it honors a design these venerable arbiters deemed transformative, but also because it honored a fountain—a campus fountain, no less.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about campus fountains. Actually, I think about campus fountains often. I walk past three on my own campus quite regularly, and I rarely fail to...

The FedEx Global Education Center at University of North Carolina, designed by Leers Weinzapfel Associates and Pearce Brinkley Cease + Lee, revitalized the university’s international programs. (Photographs by Peter Aaron/Esto)

Montreal — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened a global-education building last year that has helped to ground and unify the various international programs on campus, an administrator told a crowd at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference.

UNC has had aspirations for global education, but its international programs and departments were scattered and hidden all over the campus, said Raymond B. Farrow III, the executive director of the university’s Frank...

A new building for the Muskie School of Public Service is nearing completion. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

Portland, Me.— On the University of Southern Maine’s Portland campus, construction crews are finishing a striking, glassy new building for the university’s Muskie School of Public Service and Osher Lifelong Learning Center.

Designed by Koetter Kim & Associates, the four-story building is expected to earn gold-level certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Among other features, it has geothermal heating and cooling—relying on wells drilled down 1,500 feet—and a vegetative roof from...

Montreal — Here at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference, designers from Moseley Architects took a close (and, some might argue, courageous) look at the performance of some of the buildings they had designed for Virginia universities under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The buildings were, for the most part, successes — with some interesting caveats.

The Moseley designers, Bryna Dunn and George Nasis, presented data on buildings at the College of William and Mary, Longwood University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Mary Washington. The building at Longwood was the highest-rated structure of the bunch, having attained LEED gold. In each case, Ms. Dunn and Mr. Nasis examined how the buildings had performed compared with the LEED projections for their performance, performance...