Stanford U., with its large campus and its network of paths, has won plaudits for encouraging students and staff members to bike (Erin Lubin, Bloomberg News, Getty Images).

By Goldie Blumenstyk

Plenty of colleges offer cyclists places to lock up their bikes. But an institution will need to do more than buy a few bike racks to qualify as a "Bicycle Friendly University" under a program being unveiled this week by the League of American Bicyclists.

The program is designed to help institutions develop holistic policies on biking. A 90-question application requires colleges to assess how much support they offer cyclists—for instance, by providing bike maps of the campus and including information on cycling in freshman orientation.

Applying for a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum designation through the Bicycle Friendly University program will be "an education in itself," says Bill Nesper,...

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Joyce Hwang's Bat Tower was designed for a sculpture park near Buffalo, N.Y. (U. at Buffalo photos)

An assistant professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo has created a striking bat house for a local sculpture park, and she says she hopes the high-profile project will help make more people aware of the infection that has decimated the bat population in parts of the country.

Joyce Hwang, the designer, says the 12-foot-high tower is constructed of more than 400 pieces of finished plywood arranged to provide long, tight spaces in which the tiny residents would be comfortable. She took her inspiration, in part, from the caves that bats frequently inhabit. The tower is held together by steel cables and screws.

Located beside a pond in the Griffis Sculpture Park, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, the tower was paid for with a $10,000 grant from the New York State Council on ...

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A boathouse is one of two new buildings for athletes at the U. of Iowa. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Iowa City — Students at the University of Iowa have some sleek new exercise options. The university's vast and glassy Campus Recreation and Wellness Center opened in August and offers 215,000 square feet of space for sweaty see-and-be-seen activity at the corner of West Burlington and South Madison Streets. Meanwhile, the university's rowing teams moved a year ago into a beautiful new boathouse at a bend in the Iowa River near the north end of the campus. The building is so attractive that the first time I drove past it I guessed it must be an art museum.

The recreation center (left), which cost $70-million, was designed by RDG Planning and Design. It houses three floors of fitness equipment overlooking West Burlington Street, in addition to a climbing wall, two...

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