On Monday, I wrote about visiting the wood-fired kiln at Saint John's University on a sustainability-oriented Midwest tour last week. After some time in Collegeville, Minn., I and my two traveling companions headed into Wisconsin and Iowa, where we hunted down sustainable-agriculture sites. First stop, Milwaukee.

There we visited Growing Power, the base of operations for one of the gurus of the local-food movement: Will Allen, a former professional basketball player who started a small farm on a city plot in Milwaukee. His intensively cultivated farm, set in an old greenhouse, has been an inspiration for young people who are interested in urban farming and even a source of research for some university food programs. A couple of years ago he won a MacArthur "genius grant" for his work.

From the press surrounding Growing Power, one might get the impression that Mr. Allen started...

• At the U. of Virginia, Elite Jefferson Fellows Enjoy Sustainable $22.8-Million Building (Jefferson Scholars Foundation photo)

• U. of Missouri at Columbia Begins Installing Biomass Boiler

• Sodexo, Saint Mary's College of California Create Campus Demonstration Garden

• Cornell U. Plans Major Expansion of Particle Accelerator

The Federal Emergency Management Agency released $152,534,261.65 to the University of Iowa Wednesday to help replace buildings ruined by the flood that swept through the middle of the campus in June 2008. The money will go toward new homes for the Hancher Auditorium (left; Chronicle photograph) and the Voxman School of Music, as well as toward a new art building and the cost of eight temporary heating and air-conditioning units that sustained the campus while its damaged power plant was closed.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, announced the award in a news release.

Earlier this month the university chose the architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli to design a replacement for the 1972 auditorium, designed by Max Abramowitz. And Steven Holl Architects is working on plans for a new art building. The university plans to move the music school from its current location beside the...

"Landmark" is an easy term to overuse—it can serve as a sort of courtesy title for good design—but Antoine Predock's 1993 Classroom Laboratory Administration Building at the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona is a landmark in the true sense of the word: It's an unmistakable complex with an iconic, triangle-topped tower that is easily visible to commuters passing the campus morning, noon, and night on busy Interstate 10.

It is also, apparently, doomed.

Last week the California State University Board of Trustees approved a plan to demolish the two-building complex, which university officials said had "taxed operational budgets and personnel due to a number of construction flaws and mechanical-system failures." It will be replaced, officials said, with "a student-services building that is much easier to navigate than the CLA."

The trustees approved the demolition after ...

• Southern Methodist U. Opens 41,000-Square-Foot Home for Its Education College (Photo by Ian Aberle)

• St. John's U. Plans $25-Million Renovation of Its Marcel Breuer Library (Read more about the university's Breuer buildings here)

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• Yale U. Students Form Club for Underappreciated Architecture

The U. of Cincinnati's Care/Crawley Building provides swing space for renovations to the larger Medical Sciences Building behind it. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Swing space is always a challenge on campuses: A building is overdue for renovation, but before the work can begin, the occupants have to be moved elsewhere. With overcrowding the rule at colleges across the country, where can those people go for a year or two?

Some institutions put up swing-space buildings, like the residence hall into which Yale University undergraduates have moved, college by college, while the university's Collegiate Gothic residential quadrangles have undergone makeovers. Other institutions find swing space in campus basements (as did Pomona College) or off campus (the Johns Hopkins University bought a nearby apartment tower and used part of it for faculty offices during the recent...

Today's Boston Globe details the money woes that Harvard University has faced since the economic meltdown, and the way those woes have affected the university's building programs.

The nation’s wealthiest university doubled its debt load over the last  three years, to $6-billion. It spent $204-million to pay down its debt in fiscal 2009, or 40 percent more than the prior year -- money that deans would rather have spent on projects and programs. And Harvard is now spending a larger slice of its $3.8-billion operating budget on debt service than its peers.

The article says that since Harvard has as much debt as it can handle right now, major projects like the Allston campus have been shelved for the foreseeable future. Projects that were already started before the meltdown, like the $250-million law-school building, will continue, but officials quoted in the article said that they will...

• U. of Texas at Dallas Celebrates Campus-Enhancement Effort (U. of Texas at Dallas photo)

• Current U. of California at San Diego Construction Projects Total $1.75-Billion

• Arizona State U. Polytechnic Campus Plans New Dorms, Dining Hall

• Despite New Buildings, U. of Georgia's Appetite for Space Remains Unslaked

About a week ago, two friends and I hit the road and drove through the Midwest. This was a well-deserved vacation for me; my neighbor Joe Hamilton, who works on yards-to-gardens projects in our little corner of Baltimore; and Arthur Morgan, who runs an urban-agriculture group, Hamilton Crop Circle. (It's named for a Baltimore neighborhood, not our traveling buddy Joe.)

Now some people go to the beach on their vacations, but we're odd. We visited a series of sustainability-oriented places -- mainly agricultural sites -- picking up whatever information we could gather.

Our first stop was not agricultural, but certainly focused on sustainability and localism: We attended the 11th firing of the kiln at Saint John's University, in Collegeville, Minn. Last year, I wrote about the kiln and profiled the artist who built it, Richard Bresnahan, for The Chronicle Review.

Mr....

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