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You probably know the story: In 1895, fire gutted the single most famous academic building in America, the Rotunda that Thomas Jefferson designed to be the centerpiece of the University of Virginia campus. The university’s Board of Visitors chose a supremely talented architect, Stanford White, to oversee the Rotunda reconstruction. But he made significant changes to Jefferson’s building, among them substituting a grand Roman-style interior for Jefferson’s more modest Greek Revival design. In the 1970s, the building was renovated again, and many of White’s interior elements were removed. His exterior changes remained, however, including columns larger than those Jefferson used and a green copper roof the original architect would not have recognized.

Now, according to the Charlottesville weekly The Hook, the university is debating another set of changes to the Rotunda and to the Lawn stretching out before it. The debate pits those who would restore as much as possible of Jefferson’s vision for the campus against those who say that generations of alumni and friends of the university have sanctioned White’s changes.

The problem, as the article describes it, is that all 95 percent of the existing Rotunda is White’s work and that of those who carried out the 1970s renovation. “The only thing that’s really left of Jefferson is the brick,” according to Brian Hogg, a historic-preservation planner for the university. “Are we faithful to the White exterior, or do we try to recapture more Jefferson?”

In addition, some on the campus want the building returned to the university library system. “The day the library moved out was the day that the Rotunda lost contact with the student body,” says Brian Broadus, a lecturer in architectural history at the university.

The debate promises to be interesting, to say the least, although the Hook article seems to cast its lot with those who want the university to stick with what it’s got now. As Richard Guy Wilson, an architectural-history professor at the university, puts it: “We have a genuine Stanford White, and destroying that for a fake Jefferson is just plain wrong.”

What do you think?

Xarissa Holdaway

I recently interviewed Mark Kapner, a senior engineer at the Texas utility Austin Energy, about some myths in the clean-energy conversation. The conversation got me thinking about the communications gap in our system for generating electricity—a gap that leads utilities to operate as though they were always on the verge of peak demand.

“What utilities need is a mix of resources to assure that they can match supply to demand at all times,” Mr. Kapner said. “Those resources will be a mixture of dispatchable generating units and non-dispatchable units—such as wind and solar—as well as energy storage and controllable demand, now termed demand-response.”

But that’s not how the system works now. Because utilities don’t always get accurate information about what users need, historically they have made sure they can handle spikes in demand by always being over-prepared. The system as it exists is extraordinarily dumb.

Richard Johnson, the director of sustainability for Rice University, sees a similar issue in the mechanical systems of his campus. Over-designed, inefficient systems waste a lot of energy and money, and also make temperatures harder to calibrate and control, which leads to overheating or overcooling building residents.

One part of the solution, says Mr. Johnson, is to right-size in the first place and make sure that the amount of power drawn by the system is proportionate to actual use. A solid set of baseline data is useful here, as is getting all the engineers, operators, architects, and managers talking to each other in the beginning stages of the design process, to make sure each new building and retrofit is being designed for real, not hypothetical, use.

Another part of the solution is to get a better sense of the actual need by using technologies—such as smart metering—that allow universities to see exactly where their power is going, to stop leaks, and to turn off equipment that isn’t being used. In other words, we need to get the machines to tell us what they need and what they’re using.

Too many colleges can isolate energy usage only by building or floor, not by room or even by machine, making guesswork all too likely. The Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University is one of a host of research hubs experimenting with these metering devices, in the hopes that they might make consumers aware of their own electricity needs. Ideally, your fridge, your computer, your lights, your air conditioners, and your phone charger will all tell you how many kilowatts they’re drawing.

And the final step—getting all that information back to the utility—takes place in a process called demand response. Using this technology, energy providers have a better sense of the need, which is especially important when it comes to weather-dependent sources of power. At Stanford’s Leslie Shao-Ming Sun Field, data such as wattage arriving from the grid or being pumped back into it, propane consumption, solar-panel voltage, and the temperatures of individual solar arrays are all reported in real time. The level of detail ensures efficiency, and allows managers to fine-tune the system according to what’s actually needed. These systems also allow for small-scale, scattered generation, such as a rooftop wind turbine that sends any of its host’s unused power back into the grid.

The technology to monitor and manage both supply and demand sides is rapidly being perfected, and much of it is already well past the pilot stage. But on a large scale, we haven’t integrated the tools that will create a real conversation between energy generators and users. It’s a silence we can no longer afford. —Xarissa Holdaway

Xarissa Holdaway, one of this summer’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is campus e-news coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s campus-ecology project. You can read her previous posts here.

Cooper Union’s new academic building, designed to achieve LEED gold certification, occupies a prominent site on Third Avenue in Manhattan. (Iwan Baan photo)

Three years ago administrators at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art decided, along with their financial advisers, to “ratchet back the financial risk” in the institution’s investments, The Wall Street Journal says in an article today that describes how the college was able to afford a striking new academic building even though it charges its students no tuition.

Although many other colleges have seen the value of their investments decrease significantly, Cooper Union’s endowment is expected to amount to about $600-million as the fiscal year ends today — just about what it was this time a year ago, the newspaper says. The institution’s prize asset is the land underneath one of New York’s most prominent Art Deco landmarks, the Chrysler Building. The property, which brings the institution $19-million a year, was a gift from the family of Peter Cooper, the 19th-century industrialist and philanthropist who founded the college.

A 1999 deal between Cooper Union and the owner of the Chrysler Building set ground rent for the property far into the future, and that guaranteed income allowed the institution to borrow cheaply to pay for the new nine-story building, designed by Morphosis, the architect Thom Mayne’s firm. The sculptural, mesh-sheathed building will house Cooper Union’s engineering school along with its humanities and social-sciences programs, in addition to providing some facilities for art and architecture programs.

A recent entry on the Greening the Campus blog opens with a provocative question: “Would you wash your hands with a fire hose?”

Richard Johnson, director of sustainability at Rice University, discusses the problem of “over-designing” various systems in buildings, which leads to waste. His blog entry focuses on a heating-and-cooling system in a recently designed building on the Rice campus:

[The] engineering consultant originally recommended 2,000 tons of cooling. An internal team from Rice whittled this down to 300 tons of cooling — an 85-percent reduction. To date, the building’s actual consumption has not peaked above 40 tons, although it eventually will. The difference between the original recommendation and the actual peak from operations to date is a factor of 50. That’s over-design! As a comparison, when we wash our hands under a sink, the stream of water is typically flowing at a rate of 2.5 gallons per minute. If this were over-designed by a factor of 50, the flow rate would be 125 gallons per minute, which is typical for a fire hose. So again I ask the question, would you wash your hands with a fire hose? Certainly not, and no consultant would recommend that we do so. But when it comes to energy, we’ll get the equivalent of a fire hose to wash our hands if we’re not careful.

Mr. Johnson makes various recommendations for the design process to avoid this kind of waste — those recommendations mainly focus on good communication among people with expertise and a close look at data.

I also recall a session at the 2007 annual conference for the Society for College and University Planning that focused on over-design of laboratories — in particular the over-design of lighting. Another issue raised in that session was segregating lab functions to limit how much costly high-capacity ventilation was needed.

A monument by Santiago Calatrava has eight levels of moving stainless-steel ribs. (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology image)

This month the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, dedicated an unusual new campus monument by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who was recently selected to design a new building for the University of South Florida.

The monument, which is more than 90 feet tall, has an exterior made up of 224 moving stainless-steel ribs on eight levels. According to a news release from the institute, the monument was designed to have “a wave-like motion generated by the electric motor that sits atop the mast; each moving rib induces the sequential motion of the next, from the top level to the bottom.”

“The effect of this sinusoidal movement is an illusion of the whole monument rotating on its axis,” says the project manager, Michael Polonsky. “Actually, the movement is more akin to our ribcage moving in and out during the process of breathing.”

The monument, which is illuminated at night, honors Russell Berrie, a New Jersey toymaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who died in 2002. The Russell Berrie Foundation, established in 1985, underwrote the creation of a nanotechnology institute named for Berrie at the Technion.

Amid pressure from environmentalists and regulators, Northern Michigan University is dropping its plans for a cogeneration plant that would be partly dependent on coal, the Associated Press reports.

The 10-megawatt plant would have burned wood and wood by-products and used coal as a backup fuel, but the university asked the state to void its permit for the plant, the article says.

According to a news release from the university, the Sierra Club had been one of the lead groups opposing the coal plant.

The university will apply for a new permit for a plant that burns only wood. “We believe, once built, the cogeneration plant will result in significant cost savings to NMU and further the university’s sustainability efforts,” said Gavin Leach, vice president of finance and administration. “We hope that if we are granted the new permit, this project may qualify for some American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding, and we’d like to pursue those potential funding opportunities.”

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education has released its 2008 digest of campus undertakings in sustainability, which essentially collects the news items sent out in AASHE’s weekly e-mail messages. The 356-page document, which is available free online, covers education and curriculum, staff development, buildings, carbon-emissions programs, dining services, grounds, transportation, waste, and other areas.

A news release for the report ticks off some of the numbers from the past year: Almost 300 campuses signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, 130 green buildings were planned or built, more than 60 sustainability-focused academic programs were created, and 13 sustainability-research centers opened.

Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, calls for a reinvention of the liberal arts in this stirring talk at the 2009 TED Conference, which was recently released on TED’s Web site. She says the liberal arts should focus on broad subject areas relevant to the problems of today — health, equity, the environment, education, governance, and the uses of force — and colleges should re-engage the communities around them. Her vision shares much with that of some leading sustainability advocates.

The alternative, she explains, is irrelevance — or worse:

We have professionalized the liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. … The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one, and within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less — this despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. … As one moves up the ladder, values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion. Questions such as “What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making?” are treated with more and more skepticism, and move off the table. In so doing, the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to the fundamentalists, who you can be sure have no compunctions about using education to further their values, the absolutes of a theocracy.

This has been a really unusual year for us. Ever since our first garden season in 2002 we have struggled yearly with drought. This year we have had lots of rain, and it’s been fun to watch how the garden responds. Crops are shooting up. We are harvesting tons of snap peas, a few zucchinis have appeared, and the pole beans are going wild. Garlic has been harvested, leaving room to plant winter squash.

Pole beans, May 18

Pole beans, June 16

Zucchini, May 18

Zucchini, June 16

Garlic, June 6

Harvested garlic, June 16

The evening of June 9 we had a huge hail storm. There was some damage, but not nearly as much as there might have been.

Hailstones on the deck behind my house

We started an experimental melon patch this year, and the melons love the rain (maybe that’s why they’re called watermelons). Tomato plants are already getting out of control, and some carrots and beets are ready to harvest.

There have been surprises — some more welcome than others. Potatoes planted last year have suddenly reappeared this year, with some staggering results. On the other hand, the cole crops (broccoli, kale, chinese cabbage, etc.) and spinach have grown too fast, and have bolted early. Fortunately, these can be replanted as fall crops, so we’ll have another chance.

Our community workdays have been busy. The rain has taken the wire grass to new heights (and depths) and we continue to dig the roots out of the mud. This year we are concentrating on our strawberry patch. While we got the area terraced and the plants did pretty well this year, we are working on an area of weeds that seems to resist all our efforts. At least the ground is soft, and we continue to hope that we’ll eventually get all of the wire grass cleared out.

Scott continues to work on the water lines. Two “water trees” have already been set up, making it easier for people to connect their hoses and water their plants while leaving the pathways clear for mowing. —Alix Ingber

Alix Ingber, who has taught Spanish at Sweet Briar College since 1980, is a Buildings & Grounds guest blogger who is contributing occasional updates on this season’s progress at the Sweet Briar Community Garden. You can read her previous updates here.

Bar code: Students drew inspiration from UPC symbols in designing shelving in the architecture school at the State U. of New York at Buffalo. (Photo by Doug Levere)

I took a recent trip to upstate New York to visit a few colleges, and I made a stop at the architecture school at the State University of New York at Buffalo. There, Brian Carter, the dean, has students working on what he calls “small projects” — efforts to redesign much-used public spaces, both to enliven the surroundings and to give students real training.

Light tables in the visual-resources center hang off the wall.

Mr. Carter, who is British, says there are many opportunities in Europe for young architects to participate in competitions and get their names out there. One of the difficulties of being a young architect in America is that there are too few opportunities to break into the field and show one’s work, he says.

The small projects offer those opportunities. “We have a timetable and a budget,” he says. The prospect of designing work that will be lived in by peers is “likely harrowing,” he says.

Two projects designed and built by students stood out. One was a desk and shelving in the School of Architecture’s library. It was designed and built out of maple plywood by three students, Michael Baillie, Ernest Ng, and Dan Stripp; the inspiration for the vertical lines in the design came from UPC symbols seen on the dust jackets of books everywhere.

The other is a futuristic design for the school’s visual-resources center, which houses the college’s films, photos, and slides. The doors on the shelving along one wall are translucent, illuminated with different colors from within. The light tables are a striking element: They are made of steel and hung on a curved remnant of a wall that has been cut to open up the room. It was designed by a team of students, led by Mehrdad Hadighi, the chairman of the architecture program.

Shelving in the visual-resources center is painted and illuminated from within. (Photo courtesy State U. of New York at Buffalo)

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