Rise in Tornadoes, Floods Poses Risk to Colleges
What if the sort of extreme weather that has left the University of Iowa inundated in floodwaters is not a freak event? What if it is a sign of things to come? (Photograph by AP Images)

Art & Architecture Renovations Near Completion at Yale U.
Paul Rudolph's 1963 Brutalist icon is getting a makeover, plus an addition by Charles Gwathmey.

Guest Blogger: Anne Stephenson
Even the greenest construction project increases a college’s carbon footprint.

Guest Blogger Archive

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A Green Building as a Billboard for Science
(A 2006 Chronicle video)

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About Buildings & Grounds

Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.

Guest Blogger: In Campus Design, Contrast Takes On Evenness

Gina Crandell, one of this month’s guest bloggers, is visiting professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also principal of Gina Crandell Landscape Architecture, a Boston practice working with campuses and land trusts.

Imagine walking in a forest. A small, unpaved parking lot is provided, controlling the number of visitors and setting the tone: This forest discourages human intervention so as not to harm the impression that it’s natural. There are few surprises while walking here, with the exception of occasional animal movement.

Except to a trained eye, the forest doesn’t reveal that it was cleared a hundred years ago. Because it is selectively managed and visitors are invited to wander about, this forest is actually a garden. Yet the fiction of naturalism prevails: Disguising intervention is good for our encounter with nature. But in fact we understand natural processes better when we can contrast them with our interventions.

Now imagine something unexpected in the forest. Without any signs explaining why, the path takes you into a big oval space, larger than a soccer field and open to the sky. It is formed by a closely planted, elliptical line of trees that form an edge to the forest beyond. Suddenly your perception of the forest is heightened by this contrast. You are brought out of your passive contemplation. You look more intently now. Questions arise. Who has intervened in this forest? Does this space, which is clearly architectural, also have an ecological explanation? You wonder if the forest through which you had just walked is as natural as it seemed moments before. You begin to wonder what “natural” means.

So what does the experience of this forest say about the campus, where the range of environments often includes regenerating forests, arboreta, and designed lawn-and-tree landscapes? It, too, is a garden, yet with much more active and attentive viewers. The campus cannot disguise its intervention, nor would it want to.

So how does a campus express architecture with living plants in a way that would heighten the experience of natural processes? One way is by contrast, as suggested in the forest above. On campus, drawing clearer lines of distinction between different types of maintenance is an easy way to do this.

Let’s take the most mundane example: mowing. Imagine two levels of maintenance: the manicured lawn, so symbolic of the campus, and the meadow, where grasses are mown only twice a year (to reduce the carbon footprint and save water and costs).

Now let’s think about making mowing architectural. The manicured lawn is preserved in the campus locations that are most symbolic and where, more importantly, the lawn is given form: an oval in the center of campus, a rectangle in the quad, and a line where it crosses a major path. The areas outside these forms grow unevenly.

Students and visitors to the campus see this difference and become more engaged in natural processes (and in carbon footprints) because they know that a meaningful distinction has been made. They recognize why the grasses have become overgrown and appreciate the manicured lawn more. This perceptual engagement is not likely in an environment of evenness where meaningful distinctions are not being made.

There are hundreds of ways to employ contrast on campus, as well as many architectural ideas—such as repetition, density, and structure—that can be used. Landscape architects can employ them at the large scale of the campus forest as well as at the intimate scale of a single space. Unfortunately, too many colleges choose evenness: of lawn and sprinkled trees, or the “natural” area where intervention is disguised. —Gina Crandell

You can read Gina Crandell’s earlier post here.

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