The Nott Memorial was completed in the late 1870s. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

Schenectady, N.Y. — Union College’s Nott Memorial is one of the great period pieces of American higher education, but it has as checkered a past as any college building anywhere.

(Union College image)

A round building on the site the Nott occupies was first envisioned 200 years ago this spring in a pioneering series of campus plans drawn up by Joseph Ramée, a French architect, and Eliphalet Nott, Union’s president from 1804 to 1866. The plans do not describe the building’s function.

(Union College image)

But Paul Venable Turner, an emeritus art-history…

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Lewisburg, Pa. — Plenty of people—and you may well be one of them—skip right over every poem in The New Yorker and could not be dragged by a team of Budweiser Clydesdales to any event that had “poetry” in its name. So even though Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry regularly fills a former chapel for poetry readings and draws overflow crowds to a campus nightclub for poetry slams, it’s also laid a whole series of poetic ambushes around town, hoping to trap the unsuspecting as they wait in line for a movie or head to the playground with their kids.

Each ambush—there are 10 in all—places a poem near a local landmark to which the poem is relevant. One poem is across from a Civil War monument, another overlooks a barn that was part of the Underground Railroad, and a third—“Solstice,” by Leslie Harrison—stands beside a cemetery:

… I’m sorry for your loss I…

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The former president of a foundation that provides housing for New York City college students will pay $4.5-million to settle accusations that he and his wife improperly collected millions of dollars from the foundation through a shell company that handled phone, Internet, and cable-television service in the foundation’s facilities. An investigation by the state attorney general’s office discovered that George Scott, who was president of Educational Housing Services Inc., until last month, had been siphoning money from the foundation since 2003. Members of the foundation’s board will also pay $1-million for neglecting their fiduciary duty, the attorney general’s office announced. The money paid in the settlement will go toward reducing students’ rent and improving amenities in the foundation’s facilities.

The Appalachian State U. entry in the 2011 Solar Decathlon is now available commercially. (Photos by Jim Tetro, U.S. Department of Energy)

In what is almost certainly a first, the modular sustainable house that Appalachian State University students designed and entered in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon is now being marketed nationwide. The house, which won the People’s Choice award at the decathlon, is available from Deltec Homes either in kit form or, for customers in western North Carolina, as a finished building.

Until now, decathlon houses have wowed visitors and drawn praise from architects, but their commercial impact has been limited. But clearly Deltec officials see promise in the Appalachian State house, which can be easily expanded by adding more modules along the length of a porch that supports solar panels to provide power. For buyers…

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Wilson College’s 1925 library has been closed for more than a year, but the college has been working with Murray Associates Architects to plan a renovation that would keep the 1925 portion (at left) and replace a 1962 addition with a glass-walled structure. (Murray Associates image)

Chambersburg, Pa. — For such a small institution—it has only 695 students this semester—Wilson College has a very handsome library. It’s a restrained Collegiate Gothic building from 1925 with limestone towers flanking a central doorway and arched windows overlooking the college’s central green. The windows also enliven the interior, which is otherwise plain.

Unfortunately, the library has been closed for more than a year, thanks to an assortment of leaks that are emblematic of the challenges facing the struggling women’s college, which has not been able to meet its enrollment goals. The most …

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