The Wall Street Journal says that some investors would love to have the real-estate sense of the Lone Star College System. The college system bought an eight-building, 1.2-million-square-foot corporate campus from Hewlett-Packard for $42.2-million, or $35 a square foot.

“The price paid by the two-year community-college system was about $100-million less than the number discussed a little more than a year earlier with Lone Star, according to a person familiar with the transaction. ‘We saw it as a grand opportunity to snatch up a beautiful campus for considerably less than its value,’ says Richard Carpenter, chancellor of Lone Star, which serves a suburban swath of the northwestern Houston region. ‘This is what the economy did for us.’”

The Journal says the deal is the second-largest U.S. office transaction...

Of all the people I meet at colleges, I tend to enjoy talking to the facilities guys the most. These people can often give you a detailed description of the guts of an old boiler, discuss the energy market in their region, and talk sensibly — even eloquently — about sustainability issues. They have to be Renaissance men and women, because they never know what task they might have to take on, what new building feature they might have to maintain.

And the picture here pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? This is Tyler Falwell, a facilities-staff member at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada, maintaining a 40-foot-high “bio wall” in an environmental-science building. Bio walls have common house plants embedded in a porous material attached to a vertical surface; water is pumped up to the top and trickles down to feed the plants. Bio...

A $40-million infomatics center at Northern Kentucky U. will feature a glass-enclosed “digitorium.” (Northern Kentucky U. image)

Two projects focusing on technology centers caught the eye recently. Northern Kentucky University is betting that a new infomatics center will help raise the institution’s image, according to a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

“Its dominant feature will be a two-story glass-encased ‘digitorium,’ essentially a black-box theater packed with digital, high-definition, and three-dimensional screens and cameras. Inside the space, students will be able to re-create everything from a network operations center to a traditional Broadway show,” the Enquirer story says. The building will cost $40-million, and another $12-million will go to...

The State U. of New York at Buffalo will set up a seven-acre solar array to power student apartments.

Buffalo doesn’t necessarily bring to mind clear weather, but we are told that the city is the sunniest and driest place in the Northeast in the spring and summer. (Perhaps we’re thinking of a gray Buffalo in wintertime.) In any case, that window of fun in the sun has prompted the State University of New York to take on a renewable-energy project: the largest solar array in New York.

The $7-million project will set up 5,000 panels on seven acres of the university’s North Campus, to generate 1.1 megawatts, or enough power for 735 apartments. A story in The Buffalo News says that the panels will save the university $75,000 to $100,000 a year. (That means the panels will pay for themselves in 70 to 93 years. Do we have our math right?)

The New York Power Authority is...

Libby Sander, a Chronicle reporter, has an article in the latest issue about Wayne State University’s drive to revitalize parts of Detroit:

With the help of Wayne State University, located just down the street, facelifts of a handful of old buildings, many of them once at the heart of the automotive industry, are leading the way in the revitalization of one small corner of this sprawling city. Building by building, block by block, the university is gradually helping to transform an area that was, until very recently, known more for its blight than for its bustle.

Just as its collegiate cousins in places like Philadelphia and Cincinnati have done, Wayne State is eager to spruce up the neighborhoods around its campus and bolster a local economy sagging under the weight of the foundering auto companies. Its early success is already evident. The areas known as...

View Larger Map This vacant lot is the future home of a campus of New York U. (Google Maps image)

New York University plans to build a campus in Washington, D.C., according to a story in the Washington Business Journal. The new campus — which will be called “NYU-D.C.” — will consist of a single building in the 1300 block of L Street N.W.

The 75,000-square-foot building, designed by Hickok Cole Architects, will include five floors of student living space (room for 200 students) as well as classroom facilities. The campus will open with curricula that will be apt for D.C. life and culture: politics, economics, history, journalism, and art history. The center will be finished by 2012, and NYU is aiming ...

A plan to bulldoze nine acres of woods at the University of Maryland at College Park has riled students, who think that the plan is at odds with the university’s oft-touted green image.

According to a story in the Baltimore Sun, the university plans to clear the woods to make way for maintenance sheds, a mail-handling depot, and a parking lot for the university’s buses and trucks. “The university says they’re going to become carbon neutral by 2050, but they make a decision to cut down nine acres of forest on the campus,” Davey Rogner, a senior from Silver Spring who’s majoring in environmental restoration, told the Sun.

Anne G. Wylie, vice president for administrative affairs, told the paper that the whole controversy was “a complicated problem,” in which the university...

The new engineering building is designed by Perkins + Will. (SUNY-Buffalo image)

The State University of New York at Buffalo has broken ground on a $61-million, 130,000-square-foot engineering building, designed by Perkins + Will. The building will expand the engineering department’s space by a third. The building is expected to be finished by 2011.

What makes this construction noteworthy, however, is its place in a larger plan. Officials say the building is part of some $360-million in construction this spring and summer as a step in the UB 2020 plan, which will add millions of square feet to the university over the coming decades.

On Saturday Ball State University will fire up a drilling machine that will start the construction of the country’s largest geothermal system, which will provide heating and cooling to more than 40 buildings on campus. Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, will start the drill in the groundbreaking ceremony.

Ball State’s system, which will involve boring some 4,000 geothermal wells, is expected to cost around $65-million and save $2-million in energy costs per year. The system will also cut emissions at the university roughly in half — eliminating some 80,000 tons per year.

For the uninitiated, geothermal technology can be difficult to understand: In a geothermal system, fluid-filled pipes are installed underground, in wells that can be hundreds of feet deep. The pipes take advantage of the ground’s...

Thomas Fisher, the dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, writes in the recent architecture issue of The Chronicle Review that the world needs architects to step up and design for a better world: