A big new building for the Tyler School of Art at Temple U. opens next month. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Philadelphia — When Carlos Jimenez began asking students and faculty members at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art what they wanted him to include in a new downtown building for the school, many of them told him how attached they were to quirky spaces on the school’s existing campus on an old estate in the city’s Elkins Park neighborhood.

So Mr. Jimenez, an architecture professor at Rice University who also has his own practice, made a special effort to create spaces for socializing, activities, and art in the 236,000-square-foot building, which the...

A design by Net+Work+Camp+Us was chosen in an earlier stage of an effort by housing officials to improve residence-hall design. (Image courtesy of ACUHO-I)

Baylor University, Colorado College, and Indiana University at Bloomington have been chosen for the next stage of an ambitious effort to rethink residence halls for the 21st century. The effort, called the 21st Century Project, is a multiyear undertaking of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International.

In the first stage of the project, completed in 2007, a jury selected a winner from among 46 entries in a contest to design the ideal dormitory room...

Johns Hopkins used to watch ships in Baltimore’s harbor from the six-story tower of the Clifton Mansion. (Photo by Shelby Silvernell)

The Clifton Mansion, the 19th-century Italianate home of the philanthropist and university founder Johns Hopkins, has fallen into disrepair and is going through a slow-motion renovation that may not even be keeping up with the pace of rot, according to an article in Urbanite, a Baltimore magazine. Preservationists and others in Baltimore estimate that a complete renovation of the house would cost between $6-million and $20-million.

It turns out that the mansion and the land around it might have been the home of the...

Morphosis designed Cooper Union’s new academic building. (Cooper Union rendering)

New York — Cooper Union’s new academic building, scheduled to open in about three months, is not yet covered by the undulating stainless-steel screen that promises to make its exterior an instant landmark. But a hard-hat tour of the building last week revealed that its interior will be every bit as striking.

The nine-story, 175,000-square-foot building was designed by Thom Mayne, who is a principal in the Los Angeles firm Morphosis as well as a professor of architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles. Located just across Third...

This new building at Utica College houses a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF. Just you try to hack in, pal. (Photo courtesy Utica College)

Utica, N.Y. — I am standing in a room that I will probably never stand in again, no matter how many times I visit Utica College in the future.

At first glance, it seems like nothing special. It’s a plain, white room — not much bigger than an average office meeting room — with a closet at one end and a round table with chairs in the center. That my Utica tour guides had to enter a code into a sophisticated lock on the door was my first sign that this place is special. The second sign might have been the big, circular lock, situated above the first. It made...

The News-Gazette reports that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is scrapping its plan for a wind turbine because the $4.6-million that would have paid for the project is badly needed for deferred maintenance on campus.

University officials said that the 1.5-megawatt turbine would not have generated enough power to meet much of the university’s consumption — perhaps one percent. Jack Dempsey, executive director of facilities and services at the university, called the turbine “symbolic.”

That’s not because the turbine is small — Carleton College, for example, has a similarly sized turbine that generates nearly half of that college’s power. Rather, the university, like any research...

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the City College of San Francisco has settled two lawsuits that had blocked the college’s expansion into Chinatown. The college is planning a $146-million high-rise in the neighborhood.

The Chronicle reports that City College was at risk of losing its state bond for the project. Alan Sparer, the college’s lawyer, told the paper that the settlement “didn’t compromise in any way the size or scope of the campus, the academic programs that were going to be offered or the timetable for construction.”

The residents and business owners who filed the suit had said that the project would tower over the other buildings in the neighborhood and affect the historical preservation of the area. The...

Alfred University’s old Davis Gymnasium has a wooden track at floor level. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

The track is banked where it curves.

Alfred, N.Y. — According to current plans, Alfred University is one semester away from demolishing Davis Gymnasium, a small, dark, dreary facility from the 1920s whose site is due to be occupied by a new ceramics museum. So now’s your chance to see the gym’s most unusual feature — a wooden indoor running track that is set at the edge of the main floor and is banked where it curves around the ends...

Where’s the stack of trays? That’s an increasingly common question as colleges forgo trays in their dining facilities to reduce energy and water consumption (from cleaning the trays) and to prevent food waste (from students piling on more than they eat).

Some students have pushed back on the trayless campaigns, saying that balancing their food and drinks without trays is like juggling. Other students lament not having sleds to use when it snows, and still others simply want to make sure they are getting their money’s worth in the dining halls.

But colleges are...

Over the past year, Buildings & Grounds has featured some fantastic items from a select bunch, our guest bloggers. For the promise of nothing more than the little fame that an underpublicized, highly specialized blog can bring, these folks have offered up provocative ideas, helpful tips, and reflections on campus architecture, sustainability, and facilities.

We’d like to publicly thank them for their contributions. If you missed their essays, you might dig through the guest blogger archive and check them out.

The lineup included a number of professional architects and planners. Mary Jo Olenick kicked things off early in 2008, writing about how cellphones affect...