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Xarissa Holdaway, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is campus e-news coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s campus-ecology project. She is a graduate of Brigham Young University, where she majored in English. She says that a summer she spent studying and eating pastries in Paris sparked an interest in baking, which prompted an interest in the global food-supply network and in fair-trade issues, which led to her interest in sustainability.

When I moved recently, it became blindingly clear to me that my eco-cred was on dangerous ground. I’d just taken a job at the campus-ecology department at the National Wildlife Federation that would allow me to work with sustainability at universities, and in my personal life I was pretty hardcore about turning lights off and buying pesticide-free produce. Finally, I thought, with my new job and apartment my daily life will align with the things I value.

Xarissa Holdaway

I quickly realized, however, that when it came to finding a home, there was no easy “green” choice. My new office, in a suburb far outside of Washington, was built on the premise that a Metro line would soon be close enough for employees to use public transit, but delays and financing disputes have made that unlikely. No matter, I thought. I could live close enough to walk, saving gas and taking advantage of the miles of bike and walking trails in the area. It would be like my college days, when I lived six blocks from campus and actually had to use my legs to get places.

But while a five-minute walking commute would save me a lot of stress, time, carbon emissions, and money, it would effectively cut me off from the city infrastructure that drew me to D.C. in the first place. Most of my friends are based in the city, as are shops, museums, festivals, restaurants, and theaters. I believe strongly that living in convenient, higher-density areas (ideally with plenty of built-in green space) is good for people’s well-being, so I didn’t want to bind myself to a sprawling suburb that would make my work commute a dream but then leave me driving six miles to pick up eggs and spending an hour and a half in traffic to get to downtown D.C. On the other hand, living downtown and commuting out to my office was an option I’d already tried and rejected.

This was a choice I never had to make as a student. Our campus was big (about 30,000 students and staff members), but it was dense and plenty close to off-campus housing. I didn’t need a car for errands, work, or play. Every resource I needed was well within my reach. I could chat with a professor about a paper, go to class, visit the dentist, work a four-hour shift at our study-abroad office, attend another class, meet a friend for dinner, stop for groceries, and still get back to my apartment in time for roommate poker (using chocolate bars instead of money, since Brigham Young University didn’t exactly encourage such degenerate gambling activities). I didn’t need to invest in a car until just before graduation, and BYU earned my business by planning around my needs. Our relationship was symbiotic and mutually beneficial.

Campuses that are designed to meet student needs are not only good for business—since I’m sure I paid a premium for the convenience of on-campus shopping—but also good for students and faculty members. Because of their limited size and desire for good viewbook photos, many universities unconsciously follow smart-growth principles, offering centralized shopping and eating areas, walkability, common places for gathering, and plenty of green space. The benefits of this kind of development go far beyond media relations: It lessens traffic congestion and air pollution, reduces crime rates, and encourages socializing, strong community networks, and the combining of resources—all things I saw firsthand as an undergrad. Ultimately, residents are happier. And campus-wide planning creates opportunities for utility and building systems that piggyback on each other to conserve water and electricity. (Sadly, most campuses don’t take advantange of these opportunities as well as they could, which I’ll try to address in future posts.)

In case you’re curious about how my housing search turned out, I ended up choosing a place that was a bit of a compromise. A Metro stop about a mile’s walk away gets me to downtown D.C. in half an hour. I still have to drive to work, and so far I haven’t found anyone to carpool with. But my neighborhood is tree-lined and walkable, and almost everything I need is within a 20-minute radius, including a neighbor who lets me use a section of her patio to grow the vegetables that won’t thrive in my west-facing apartment. It’s not perfect, but until we plan our cities the way we plan our campuses, it’s a start.

Paul R. Brenner, a computer scientist at the University of Notre Dame, will use the natural drafts in a South Bend greenhouse to cool computer processors. At the same time, the greenhouse will benefit from the heat the machines generate. (U. of Notre Dame photos)

The University of Notre Dame has come up with a plan that will save both the university and the city of South Bend a little money on their energy bills. The university has put 400-pound computer processors, which kick out a lot of heat, in the city’s greenhouse that holds desert plants. The circulation of air in the greenhouse will help keep the computers cool, while the computers will help heat the space.

According to The South Bend Tribune, the plan will save the university about $100,000 in utility costs, even after the university pays for the electricity to power the processors. The city spent about $70,000 to heat the space last year — it’s not clear how much those bills will go down. In the winter, university officials plan to scale up the project, bringing in more computer processors to supply more heat.

Officials at the university hope that this sort of idea could be used in other settings, wherever these large research computers are used.

A fire struck the Main Building Tuesday night at Our Lady of the Lake University, in San Antonio, inflicting major damage but no injuries, the San Antonio Express-News reports.

While there were no reported injuries or deaths, the loss of the 113-year-old gothic-style Main Building is a major blow to the Roman Catholic university, which has a modest endowment of $27-million.

According to an article in The New York Times, the university has vowed to rebuild, but with a small endowment and declining enrollments, it’s not yet clear how it will do so. The fire displaced 118 students from two campus dormitories.

The cause of the blaze is unknown, but authorities are investigating the scene for signs of arson. The Express-News posted a gallery of photographs showing the fire and its effects.

Classes at the university were canceled. Final exams will resume next week, and graduation is scheduled for the following Saturday. —Hurley Goodall

The Chronicle‘s Jeffrey Brainard reports today that a California state agency will dole out $271-million to 12 institutions to construct laboratories for stem-cell research.

“The announcement appears to be a milestone in research,” the article says. “No federal agency or state has handed out more money in one fell swoop for building university labs in one scientific discipline, California officials said.”

Among the grantees are nine University of California campuses, the Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California.

The Green Campus: Meeting the Challenge of Environmental Sustainability opens on a light note, despite the throwing-down-the-gauntlet subtitle of the book. What you encounter first is a cartoon by Tom Toles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist from The Buffalo News and The Washington Post, and it depicts a billboard that reads “Honk if you love the environment.” It sits next to a jammed highway, full of honking cars.

The cartoon actually sets the agenda for The Green Campus, recently published by APPA. “This book is about getting beyond all the lip service and horn honking to actually doing something to protect this beautiful planet that is our home,” writes Walter Simpson, who is the energy officer at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a prominent advocate for sustainability.

With that, the book begins a series of instructive essays from people in the trenches about the nuts and bolts of running a sustainable campus. Mixed in are some more philosophic discussions about sustainability.

The opening essays, by sustainability advocates like Anthony Cortese, of Second Nature, and Jim Hansen, a climate scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, lay out the problems we face. David Orr, a well-known environmental studies professor at Oberlin College, writes about sustainability rating systems, and he outlines some areas of sustainability that colleges should pay particular attention to.

Chapters that follow get into the nitty-gritty in sections devoted to green power, green purchasing, recycling, green-campus profiles, and so on. Mr. Simpson describes his experiences setting up an energy policy at Buffalo. Karyn Kaplan writes about her work as the recycling coordinator at the University of Oregon. Alex Wilson, the executive editor of Environmental Building News,, outlines the qualities that make a building material green. Carol Franklin, Teresa Durkin, and Sara Pevaroff Schuh, all landscape architects, discuss the role of landscape in creating a sustainable campus.

Overall, the book is a trove of great information for any administrator trying to get on the road to sustainability. It even includes a helpful appendix with a checklist of things to do and a directory of organizations that can help.

The final section of the book, called “Overcoming Existential Paralysis,” brings it all back to the beginning. There are no essays in the section; just one more Tom Toles cartoon. It shows a man watching TV as a broadcaster says, “Worldwatch Institute says we need to stop consuming the planet immediately or we lose it. It’s as simple as that.”

The man sits silently on the couch for a moment, then a thought bubble appears above his head. It says: “Decisions, decisions.” —Scott Carlson

Misplacing things is so easy—keys, wallet, theater ceiling. Remembering what you left where is a problem with no easy solution.

At Carnegie Mellon University, for instance, a leaded-glass ceiling was removed from the Kresge Theater in the College of Fine Arts building in a renovation about 35 years ago. It wasn’t thrown out, but its whereabouts were forgotten, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Now that the university is contemplating a new renovation of the theater, the current dean of the College of Fine Arts thought the ceiling might make a good centerpiece for renovation fund raising—especially because there were some hints that it might have been made by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the famous designer. So the dean, Hilary Robinson, began asking around.

Ross Garin, assistant head of the university’s music school, eventually found the ceiling in the basement of the College of Fine Arts. It was lying on red cloth, covered with straw, and obscured by later ductwork, and it was broken in places. So far there’s no evidence that it was a Tiffany product, but the university is considering putting it back where it came from anyway. The College of Fine Arts building, a Pittsburgh landmark that is one of higher education’s most charismatic buildings, was designed by the great Beaux Arts architect Henry Hornbostel.

The ceiling wasn’t the only thing missing from the theater, by the way. A stage curtain that depicted Roman monuments has also vanished, along with murals showing scenes from Greek dramas. The pipe organ is missing, too, although Mr. Garin found the motor that operated the bellows. The music school asks anyone with helpful information to get in touch.

A playhouse at the U. of Michigan will be auctioned to support construction of a new hospital. (U. of Michigan image)

What’s the University of Michigan building these days? Glad you asked. The latest university construction project is a 90-square-foot playhouse complete with a tiled faux fireplace, high-end kitchen cabinetry, a furnished interior, window boxes, and a trellis so flowers can climb up the chimney.

The structure, called the Mott Storybook Cottage, is a fund-raising project to which a number of local companies have donated time, materials, and services—including an architecture firm, an interior-design firm, a home-construction company, and suppliers of flooring, paint, and kitchen and bath fittings.

The playhouse project was organized by the university’s Office of Medical Development, which is raising money for another construction project—the university’s new C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Women’s Hospital. That undertaking is bigger: The new facility, scheduled to open in 2011, will cost $523-million and will have 1.1 million square feet of space. The architects are HKS.

The playhouse will be auctioned during a celebrity golf event May 17 and 18.

Lawrence Speck, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was dean of architecture from 1992 to 2001. He is also a principal in the architecture firm Page Southerland Page.

I am a big fan of college campuses that have a real sense of order, cohesiveness, and harmony. I think universities have produced some of the most outstanding physical environments in the United States primarily because they have believed in planning and in the power of multiple buildings to create a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts. I think contextual concerns should be a major design determinate in creating any building on a college campus.

Lawrence Speck

But I am dismayed by what seems like a current trend among many universities to establish a style for buildings on their campuses and to slavishly replicate buildings in that style. This, I presume, is seen as a means to gain the order, cohesiveness, and harmony that is so desirable. But, in fact, it often produces campuses that are like army camps—lifeless, repetitive, and banal.

Many of the great old American campuses—like those at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities—have revered cores that are wonderfully coherent, but also rich and diverse architecturally. Harvard Yard has buildings made of refined red brick beside buildings made of rugged gray stone. It has pieces whose style we would call Georgian that sit very comfortably near buildings like Sever Hall, by H. H. Richardson. Sever was considered extremely progressive and innovative when it was built, in the late 19th century, and it is certainly not Georgian.

Yale’s Old Campus is similarly diverse, as is the substantial fabric built around it in the 1920s and 1930s. In the latter period there was a real argument between Georgian style and Gothic style (sometimes, as in Davenport College, in the same building). The Yale campus maintains the virtues of order, cohesiveness, and harmony without resorting to mindless replication of style. The result is rich, diverse, and endearing. Individual buildings, courts, and other places have their own personality and charm and yet fit comfortably into a larger whole.

I love how three of Princeton’s most iconic, historic buildings—Alexander Hall, Nassau Hall, and Chancellor Green Hall—sit next to each other at the heart of the campus in three distinctly different styles—Richardsonian Romanesque, Neoclassical Georgian, and Victorian Gothic. They speak eloquently of three different eras in Princeton’s history (and, indeed, in America’s history).

I think it would be better if we tried to learn deep, trenchant lessons from the past, rather than just lifting stylistic images from it. What gives these historic campuses that we love their authentic robustness and character? How did they manage to add each new element with genuine respect for surrounding context, but also with a true fidelity to the notion that they were building progressive institutions with an obligation to the present and the future? How did they make large, complex, yet coherent environments that maintained distinction and individuality in the parts such that each corner of the campus has its own personality and identity?

In sum, isn’t there a better way to achieve order, cohesiveness, and harmony on a campus than by the kind of one-liner method of replicating style? —Lawrence Speck

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

Cooper Union’s new academic building, now under construction across Third Avenue from the institution’s landmark main building, is already provoking strong reactions—even though it’s still under construction.

In his architecture column in The New York Sun, Francis Morrone says the building is “one of the most violent building designs I’ve ever seen,” and adds that the “giant gash out of its glassy front evokes a bomb blast.” It’s not entirely clear that he means this as criticism, mind you—especially since he describes Cooper’s nearby engineering building as “banal” (except for its “widely admired” Starbucks addition). But he does complain quite clearly that Cooper Square has “a hodgepodge of structures that has done nothing to make of this the special place it cries out to be.”

The new building was designed by Morphosis, Thom Mayne’s high-profile architecture firm. The structure is, Mr. Morrone notes, “an object building, meant to stand out from its surroundings.” And there’s no question that it will succeed in doing so. Whether it will succeed in making Cooper Square more pleasant, though, remains to be seen. Cooper’s engineering building, by the way, is due to be replaced with a commercial building designed by Fumihiko Maki.

On Friday Florida State University formally opened a new $72-million, 168,000-square-foot chemistry building that will house some 250 researchers. The architects were O’Brien/Atkins, of Durham, N.C.

The five-story, red-brick building includes three floors of laboratories designed to be flexible enough to accommodate changing research needs, as well as one floor devoted to synthetic organic chemistry and one floor that mixes labs with a 160-seat lecture hall. The labs have a total of 145 fume hoods, according to a university news release. A photo gallery is available on the Tallahassee Democrat’s Web site.

Fund raising for the building took an unusual turn when Robert A. Holton, a chemistry professor who invented the anti-cancer drug Taxol, made a donation to the project but then demanded that the gift be returned because the focus of the building had changed. A state judge ordered the university to give back $11-million of the donation that had come from the professor’s foundation, plus interest, but said the university could spend $18.5-million from the professor’s lab account, which she determined was money the university controlled (The Chronicle, September 8, 2006).

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