HOK designed this new museum building at Florida International U. (Florida International U. images)

On Friday, Florida International University will open a new, 46,000-square-foot building for its Frost Art Museum. The building was designed by HOK‘s Yann Weymouth and cost $16-million, according to the university.

The building has already received at least one enthusiastic review. Photographs show an expansive but plain curved facade broken by a jutting wedge of glass that marks the entrance. Once inside, visitors find a three-story atrium dominated by a sleek staircase.

A university Web page says the museum has nearly 10,000 square feet of display space spread across nine galleries, of which three will be reserved for the museum’s permanent collection, while the others will accommodate traveling exhibitions. Five of the galleries are illuminated by skylights. An unusual feature...

The State University of New York at Buffalo is planning tremendous growth, but also hopes to improve and enhance green and public spaces around its three campuses. (SUNY image)

The State University of New York at Buffalo has released a draft of a plan to redesign its campus. The plan includes adding or renovating seven million square feet of space (of which 70 percent will be new construction) to accommodate an additional 10,000 students and 2,500 faculty and staff members.

The plan, called UB 2020, involves moving around various schools and departments at the university, with the three campuses having distinctive purposes. The North Campus would feature the undergraduate programs and would grow from 6.6 million square feet to 9.9 million square feet. The South Campus would feature the professional schools: law, management, architecture,...

More than 15 percent of the 287 landmark elm trees on Pennsylvania State University’s University Park campus have contracted elm yellows, a deadly bacterial infection for which no cure is known. Some of the 47 infected trees are being removed this winter, according to The Daily Collegian, the university’s student newspaper.

Elm yellows, or elm phloem necrosis, infects the trees’ roots and phloem, the layer of living cells beneath the bark that carries nutrients to the leaves. A frequently-asked-questions Web page that the university created says that “research on elm yellows is relatively sparse, and little is known with absolute certainty,” but that the disease is believed to kill all the trees it infects, usually within a year or two.

Mike Bezilla, a spokesman for the university, told The Daily Collegian that the university had lost a “sizable” number of elm trees to Dutch elm...

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology created an interactive map of its unfinished campus.

Recruiting students and faculty members for a university whose campus is still under construction isn’t easy, even if the university has $10-billion at its disposal. So officials at Saudi Arabia’s new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology — known as Kaust — commissioned an interactive map that lets users click on icons and see images of the facilities that will be constructed.

The university, due to open next year, will offer graduate-level research programs open to both men and women. Its 8,900-acre campus, located on the Red Sea, has been planned by HOK Architects.

The map offers exterior and interior renderings of Modernist academic, residential, and recreational buildings, as well as of a covered “pedestrian spine” linking the main research buildings with the...

A new dance building at Point Park U. was designed so that three more studios can be added later. (Photo by Tom Bell)

Point Park University’s dance-studio building in downtown Pittsburgh is unusual for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that spiffy new downtown buildings devoted to dance are as rare as holiday Nutcracker productions are plentiful.

What’s more, the building has just earned a gold-level rating from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The project’s sustainable features include energy- and water-saving systems and floors made of sustainably harvested wood. In addition, 20 percent of the materials used in construction had been recycled, and 85 percent of the construction debris was kept out of landfills.

But what’s really interesting is that the 44,000-square-foot, $16-million building, which opened...

Architecture students at the U. of Kentucky built this tool shed for the university’s organic farm. (Photo by Niles Barnes)

What does sustainable agriculture look like in higher education? How are campuses moving from a global, conventional agriculture system that relies on increasing inputs of fossil fuels to a system that is increasingly organic and local? What role are universities and colleges playing in the sustainable-food movement?

I spent the better part of last week working and listening to speakers and sessions at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s 2008 conference, and it had me asking these questions and discovering some new answers. Vandana Shiva, a keynote speaker, laid out her ideas of what campuses can do, and at least 20 different presenters held sessions on issues related to campus food and agriculture...

Westmont College, which lost a number of buildings Thursday evening when 70-mile-an-hour winds blew a wildfire across its campus, will remain closed until December 1. Crews are working to clean up the campus, and college officials are helping both faculty members who lost their on-campus homes and 67 students whose dormitories and off-campus residences were destroyed or damaged.

The college is having temporary housing for students delivered to the campus this week and next, as well as temporary classrooms. Meanwhile, faculty members are rethinking their syllabi to make sure students are ready for final exams, which are still scheduled to begin December 15.

The college’s 111-acre campus, which incorporates parts of several former estates, is in a residential area east of Santa Barbara, Calif., near where the so-called Tea Fire began. The college posted photographs of the destruction...

This design from Behnisch Architekten won the U. of Baltimore’s competition for a new law-school building. (U. of Baltimore image)

After a high-profile competition involving the likes of Foster + Partners and Moshe Safdie and Associates, the University of Baltimore announced Monday that it had chosen the German architecture firm Behnisch Architekten to design a $107-million law-school building for a prominent downtown site. The firm will work with Ayers Saint Gross, the Baltimore architecture and planning practice, on the 190,000-square-foot project.

The winning concept, according to the Baltimore Sun, is “a 12-story, glass-clad building with interlocking elements that correspond to different interior spaces and fit together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.” The university’s president, Robert L. Bogomolny, made a point of noting that Behnisch Architekten is known for...

Rafael Viñoly Architects designed this City College of New York building to reuse the skeleton of an older structure. (City College of New York photo)

After several years of delays, the City University of New York’s City College is preparing to open a new building for its School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture. The Modernist building, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, reuses the skeleton of a structure erected in 1955 as the college’s library. It has already been reconfigured once before, in the 1980s, when it was converted to offices and classrooms.

This time, however, the structure was stripped down to its steel frame, and a new building was constructed around that. The 115,000-square-foot building, originally expected to open in 2005, is now due to open for the spring semester. True to Mr. Viñoly’s reputation for splashy gestures — such as the glassy...

Westmont College lost 15 faculty houses, a dormitory complex, and its physics and psychology buildings when a wildfire rolled over its 111-acre campus Friday evening. Officials of the college, located east of Santa Barbara, Calif., said over the weekend that they were busy assessing the damage, fencing off ruined buildings, and figuring out how soon the semester could resume. The Chronicle‘s Josh Keller filed this report.