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Academic Centers for Athletes Draw Donors
More than a dozen university athletics programs have added lavish new facilities in recent years, and academic-services budgets are soaring, a Chronicle survey finds. (Photograph courtesy of Texas A&M U.)
College Employees Value Campus Environment, Survey Finds
When a Chronicle survey asked college employees what they value about their jobs, they put the physical environment in which they work at the top of the list.
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)
Other News
Corn on the Quad at Lafayette College
Colleges Get Greener, but Not in Teaching
U. of Toledo Decides United Way Building Is Unsuitable for Its Use
New campus buildings
Multimedia
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.
New Student Center at the U. of Vermont Is Big, but Clever
The U. of Vermont’s new student center is big, yes, but too big? No.
A curving staircase rises through the building’s atrium.
Burlington, Vt. — A Boston Globe article last week called the University of Vermont’s long-awaited new student center “a sprawling, four-story monolith of brick and steel” and said some Burlington residents had complained that it was “an eyesore, a blight, a blunder, and ‘an architect’s ego gone wild.’”
Harsh words, to say the least. Were they justified? A last-minute itinerary change made it possible to go find out.
The building is the Dudley H. Davis Student Center, a 186,000-square-foot, $61-million structure located at the crest of Main Street, where the busy four-lane roadway separates the university’s academic core from an assortment of residence halls. It was designed by WTW Architects.
And while it is certainly big, it is neither eyesore nor blunder. The building takes a challenging hillside site and turns it into a grand gesture that is practical, fun, and sustainable — and bound to be a welcome change for students who had been using an 1885 library as their student center.
The site is the key to understanding the building. On the Main Street side, ground level is two very tall stories above ground level on the side facing the academic core. The building’s architects took advantage of this grade change to bury much of the structure in the hill, so that from Main Street it appears to be — depending on where you are — either two or three stories high, with a steeply pitched roof. It is a long building, but its mass is broken up with gables, projections, recesses, and concrete bands that subdivide the red-brick walls. And it is set back just far enough that it doesn’t appear to crowd the street itself.
From the campus-core side, the building looks larger, but also more interesting. For one thing, this side of the building pulls away from the main roofline at something like a 45-degree angle. For another, it deftly incorporates an existing 1950s-Moderne home-economics building, Terrill Hall, relying on its low profile to help spread out, and lessen, the visual impact of the larger structure behind it.
Clever as the exterior is, though, it’s the interior that’s really a delight. The hinge that joins the building’s two axes — the one along Main Street, the other aligned with the home-ec building — is a tall, bright, semicircular atrium. At one end of the home-ec building, an exterior wall has been refurbished for interior use and now anchors the semicircle. Across from that is a broad three-story staircase, cantilevered out from a curving wall, that brings students down from the Main Street entrance to the campus-core entrance in Hollywood-musical style, and in full view of classmates lounging in armchairs opposite the stair’s base. (Floor plans are available online.)
The atrium and the wide hallways off of it give students access to a game room, several different dining facilities, a retail store, a bank, and the university’s bookstore, which has a coffee shop attached. The student center also has offices for student-affairs departments and student organizations, a ballroom (not yet finished) with wonderful mountain views, and a fireplace lounge. An elevated plaza outside one of the eateries seems likely to become popular.
An even better bet is a tunnel that will bring students under Main Street from the residence-halls side and into the Davis Center. By using the tunnel and another arm of the center that reaches out under the elevated plaza and toward the middle of the campus, students will be able to make much of their walk to classes indoors when the weather gets cold. That, in turn, should guarantee the Davis Center plenty of pedestrian traffic — the lifeblood of campus centers. Even more that the rest of us, students like to see and be seen.
The Davis Center was designed to achieve a silver LEED rating. It has a green roof over some areas and it will rely on a computerized energy-management system to control heat, air-conditioning, and lights (it depends heavily on natural light during the day). A radiant-heat system under the loading dock is intended to reduce salt use in the winter and thus avoid contaminating runoff. Some benches in the building were made from wood harvested on university land. And public trash receptacles near the eateries include bins for food scraps that can be composted.
The one concern about the building isn’t that it’s too big for its site but that it could be too big for the university’s student population, which is just under 11,000. Spaces as large as those in the Davis Center can look pretty lonely if they’re not well used. And Burlington has plenty of other attractions to vie for students’ attention — particularly its vibrant downtown. But the building’s planners and architects appear to have done everything they could to draw students in. —Lawrence Biemiller
The building is set back from Main Street.
Terrill Hall, a 1950s-Moderne home-ec building (lower right) was incorporated into the complex.
The atrium stair descends opposite the end wall of Terrill Hall.
The new student center takes over from the 1885 Billings Library, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. It had been the university’s student center since a new library was built in the 1960s. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)
Comments
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A great job – neither too large or offensive.
Bill Kennedy UVM 65
— Bill kennedy Sep 20, 09:41 AM #
It is beautiful and I only wish it was there when I was a student at UVM!
— kellie Parks Sep 24, 12:22 PM #