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Green Building, Red Tape
Some colleges have decided to build sustainably but skip costly LEED certification. (Photo courtesy Northern Arizona U.)
Princeton Review Will Issue 'Green' Ratings in Coming College Guide
Guest Blogger: Lawrence Speck
Why you should avoid slavish devotion to a single style
Other News
Jahn's Library Dome at U. of Chicago: Elegant Minimalism or Self-Indulgent Object?
Anticipation Builds for U. of Louisville Health Research Facility
In California, Millions Are Distributed for Stem-Cell Research
New campus buildings
Multimedia
Modernism in Albany
(An audio slide show)
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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: Is Your Campus Being 'Landscaped'? Beware.
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.
Is your campus being “landscaped”? If you see flowerbeds appearing with greater frequency, and mounds of mulch, and trees and shrubs that are sprinkled around without any apparent architectural structure, the answer may be Yes.
Beware of such campuses: They don’t have landscape architects.
Colleges realize the value of their landscapes in attracting students, parents, alumni, and, increasingly, the retired. Although campus character may be an institutional priority, only large or wealthy institutions—like the University of Virginia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—can afford full-time landscape architects to provide the vision necessary for maintaining the spatial structure of the entire campus over time.
At many institutions, the job of maintaining the campus character falls between the cracks. Grounds managers already have the enormous job of daily maintenance, and often landscape architects are only hired to shrub-up new buildings. Even if a landscape master plan already exists, it won’t take shape without professional attention.
Many colleges and universities tied landscape architectural services to building construction. (Note how most of the pictures on the Buildings & Grounds blog frame buildings.) This approach is good for new buildings, but it does not take into account the needs of the whole campus as it grows and changes over time.
So how can a small college that cannot afford a full-time landscape architect address the whole campus? One strategy is to hire a landscape architect on a part-time basis, at a fraction of the cost of a full-time position. Another is to coordinate fund raising for landscape projects that include money for design services.
Why is this so important? Even seemingly small decisions—like where to plant a grove of trees—help determine the character of a campus. Without a landscape architect, the campus will lose—or will never have—an architectural structure of well-defined spaces. Instead, it will begin looking like the front yard of a McMansion, denuded of anything that came before and ornamented only by very small plants spaced very far apart.
The problems that can arise were best expressed by Robert A. Oden Jr., who is now president of Carleton College. He was president of Kenyon College when he said: “Open spaces had always been part of our vocabulary and syntax here, but that got lost . … We built where we shouldn’t have, and then we tried to cover up what had been done with cutesy-poo shrubs and suburban landscaping. It was ugly. … I’m interested in spaces that are arresting but that also fit into the environment so well that they seem always to have been there.”
Spaces that “seem always to have been there” are difficult to make. They require time and professional expertise. Someone has to consider campus history, create replanting strategies that maintain architectural structure of outdoor spaces, and, above all, have a vision of how the character of the entire campus can be expressed—socially, ecologically, and structurally—in such a way as to appear timeless and meaningful. —Gina Crandell
You can read Gina Crandell’s previous posts here and here.
Buildings & Grounds | Friday April 18, 2008 | Permalink | Contact usComments
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If I may suggest an often-overlooked strategy in this work: involve the students and faculty in your local biology department. I come from a faculty background, not an architectural background, but my work both in teaching natural history and in developing residential colleges has brought me into contact with many folks in architecture, landscape architecture, and grounds management.
So much good educational work could be done if everyone were on the same page, but there are many obstacles, not least of which is the instutition’s own organization chart. (The grounds department reports to the business managers who know nothing about education and don’t like the faculty, and the faculty, who know nothing about money and think they report to no one, don’t like the business managers.)
The whole of every campus should be a classroom, and this should include the trees, shrubs, gardens, and lawns. (Not to mention the buildings themselves.) Shopping mall shrubbery is a waste of money, to be sure, but even beautifully designed landscapes can overlook educational elements that your local faculty naturalists might be able to recommend.
— R.J. O'Hara Apr 18, 02:55 PM #
Actually this is the start of a good idea. Classes with an urban sustainability theme can have small projects that include upkeep of grounds in some manner.
— NYMOM Apr 18, 04:29 PM #