The U. of Baltimore expects its new Angelos Law Center to help attract both students and faculty members. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Until a few years ago, I’d have been hard-pressed to point out even a single building belonging to the University of Baltimore, despite having grown up in the city and visited every few months since I moved away. While the Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Notre Dame of Maryland University, and the Peabody Institute were all local landmarks, the University of Baltimore’s buildings were so nondescript that the institution might as well have been in a witness-protection program.

The U. of Baltimore student center opened in 2006.

In 2006, however, the university opened a downtown student center that called attention to itself with a lot of angled glass and curving metal. Designed by the Baltimore firm Murphy & Dittenhafer, it remains a pleasure to drive past and walk into. Apparently it also whetted the university’s appetite for standout design, because in 2008 administrators organized an international competition to choose architects for a new law-school building. Behnisch Architekten, a German firm, teamed up with Baltimore’s Ayers Saint Gross to win the contest, which attracted a total of 20 entries.

Now, at last, the law-school building is opening—despite the intervening recession, the recent drop in the number of students interested in law school, and an almost impossibly cramped site hemmed in by city streets, a highway, and railroad tracks. The new building is, I’m happy to report, as memorable as any in the city—and that includes Fort McHenry and Robert Mills’s Washington Monument.

Looking up through the atrium, you see that the floors above are not symmetrical.

To start with, the exterior is delightful. It’s a series of interlocking blocks ornamented with different checkerboard patterns of glass. The blocks disguise the considerable mass of the 192,000-square-foot, 12-story structure, and the glass reflects daylight throughout the neighborhood instead of darkening the streets the building overlooks.

But it’s the Escheresque interior that is the real prize. A bright—and brightly colored—atrium winds up through the middle, with bridges and staircases zigzagging and spiraling through the space in patterns as quirky as the law itself. On the atrium’s west side are classrooms and faculty offices, while on the east are the 32,000-square-foot, 40,000-volume library, on Floors 7 through 12, and below it offices for the school’s eight legal clinics. Floors 6 and 7 are meant to be hubs of activity, with 6 housing student organizations and a cafe with an outdoor terrace, and 7 holding the dean’s office and the entrance to the library. Tucked below grade on the east side—under a garden, actually—is a big moot-court room and auditorium. On the building’s north side is a pleasant sunken courtyard with tables and chairs and with fountains pouring out of cracks in the far wall.

In addition to bridges and stairways, the atrium offers counters on which students can use their laptops.

A spiral staircase connects upper floors on the west side of the building.

Everywhere daylight abounds, but LED light fixtures designed by the architects dangle to illuminate the atrium after nightfall—in fact, the building is entirely lit with LED fixtures. Among other energy-saving and environmentally friendly features are automatic exterior blinds that will control heat gain on warm days and a system for collecting rainwater and using it to flush toilets. At $119-million, the building cost about $5-million more than a conventional structure of similar size, says the university’s president, Robert L. Bogomolny. But the university will save about $400,000 a year in energy costs, he says.

A sunken plaza gives no hint of the expressway beyond its wall.

“The building is ideally designed for the kind of education we want to provide to students,” adds Ronald Weich, the law-school dean, who says the building will be a tool for recruiting both students and faculty members. “It’s centered on experience”—students work with clients in the clinics, in addition to practicing in moot-court sessions—but the building is also “very colorful, fun, and interactive.” And as cramped as the 30,000-square-foot site is, it’s also convenient to light- and commuter-rail lines and the Jones Falls Expressway.

And unlike many notable new buildings on university campuses, this one will be open to the public, the dean says. It’s definitely worth a look.

A 12th-floor terrace offers spectacular views of the city.

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 professor at Stanford University and author of Campus: An American Planning Tradition, says it was probably intended as a chapel. In the margins of another sheet of the Ramée plans is a pencil sketch that appears to show what the architect intended the building to look like—essentially a recreation of Rome’s Pantheon.

(Chronicle photo)

Construction on the site finally began in 1856, but the money ran out before work had progressed beyond the foundations. By the time building resumed, in the 1870s, Nott was dead and his grandson, the architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, had reimagined the structure as a polychromatic, Victorian Gothic wonderment with a number of mysterious aspects, notably the 709 colored-glass “illuminators” set into the dome in a pattern that has never been fully explained.

The building features a colorful encaustic-tile main floor and two galleries supported on cast-iron columns that also hold up the copper drum beneath the dome. It seems to have served initially as an event space and art gallery, but it was difficult to heat. In 1902 it became Union’s library, and remained so for 60 years.

Its pointed arches and elaborate stonework, however, were a challenge to campus planners. Ramée had drawn a campus of brick buildings with subtle rounded arches, and half-dozen of his buildings were completed before Nott’s death. Potter, however, had more elaborate ideas, as a sketch from the 1880s reveals. Only the building directly behind the Nott was ever constructed. Known as Washburn Hall, it was demolished in the 1960s to make room for the current library.

(Union College image)

The architects for that library project—McKim, Mead & White and its successor firm—had ideas entirely unlike Potter’s. A drawing from the 1950s shows the Nott as it would look reclad in classical garb.

(Union College image)

Happily, that project never went anywhere but into the college’s archives. Less happy, though, were the Nott’s next few decades. The main floor was jury-rigged as a theater, while the upper floors were closed off, visited only by pigeons and the occasional itinerant architecture writer. The college seriously considered tearing down the building, though it was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

(Chronicle photo; click to enlarge.)

In the 1990s, Union finally began a much-needed renovation that reinforced the exterior walls, replaced the roof, added an elevator, and more. Today the Nott offers flexible event space on the main floor, exhibit space on the second-floor gallery, and study space on the third. It is well worth going out of your way to visit.

One more thing: McKim, Mead & White’s record here at Union is, to put the best possible face on it, uneven. About 1920 the firm designed a lovely chapel that is much beloved—and for which the architects borrowed a portico from Ramée. But the plan to classicize the Nott seems, at least today, surprisingly arrogant—as tone-deaf as the firm’s rebuild, after an 1895 fire, of the University of Virginia’s rotunda (which may owe its inspiration to Ramée’s original drawings for Union). In that case, McKim, Mead & White dispensed with Thomas Jefferson’s Greek Revival approach and substituted a far grander Roman interior. Similarly, other buildings by the firm closed off quadrangles at both Union and Virginia that their original architects had left open to western vistas. In both cases, the open quadrangles may have been meant to symbolize the hopeful expansion of a young nation.

This early-19th-century painting, believed to have been made from a lost Ramée drawing, shows his scheme for the campus. (Union College image; click to enlarge)

After signing the climate commitment, Colby set a goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2015—a date far sooner than most other institutions that had signed. Only three other colleges have achieved climate neutrality under the commitment: the College of the Atlantic, Green Mountain College, and the University of Minnesota at Morris. (However, the College of the Atlantic may no longer be climate neutral—more on that below.)

Meeting the climate commitment involves certain costs. Colby started purchasing renewable electricity in 2003 at a premium that initially cost the college $50,000 a year, but now, thanks to more availability in the renewables market, it costs roughly half of that.

The college also put $11-million into a wood-fired biomass plant (pictured at left) that went online last year. By burning 22,000 tons of local, sustainably harvested wood, the biomass plant provides the college’s heat and hot water, along with some electricity—all while saving money, as much as $1.4-million last year. (The college still needs a little heating oil to give the heating plant extra power on the coldest days of winter.) To help matters, the college invested in energy efficiency and geothermal technology, which uses the constant temperature of the ground to help heat and cool buildings.

Of course, nearly every college has activities that affect the environment but that energy efficiency and renewable power can’t abate—like air travel and commuting for employees and students, which are all counted as part of the college’s emissions. To mitigate those sources of greenhouse gas, the college will invest $50,000 this year in offsets. Offsets have been the most controversial aspect of the climate commitment, with critics likening them to the old Roman Catholic indulgences—essentially buying away your sins. But others have said that they are unavoidable and acceptable for a small portion of the most difficult emissions to deal with.

The College of the Atlantic was the first signatory of the climate commitment to declare itself climate neutral, in 2007, and it did so primarily through offsets. However, it seems that the college will stop buying offsets this year, after students decided that the policy was “taking an easy way out,” said Donna Gold, a spokeswoman for the college. She said the college was working on a new energy policy and will vote next week on the policy.

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 say
to the moon, all hungerbelly and short flight.

This is the entrance to the museum of darkness.

On the hillside, the curated dead
are on permanent loan to the museum of cold.

Together the 10 poems make up the Stadler Center’s Poetry Path, which had its debut in August and takes less than an hour to tour, assuming you’re the kind of person who would. Each poem is printed on a panel alongside a map of the path and a QR code that permits smartphone users to hear, right then and there, a recording of the poet reading the work aloud.

This is not, of course, the first attempt to ambush the unwary with verse. Poems began showing up among the overhead ads in New York City’s subway cars way back in 1992, and St. Mary’s College of Maryland has displayed poems alongside campus walks for years. No doubt other institutions have tried similar stratagems as well.

It’s hard to imagine that any could have found a better mix of poems, though. The route here begins in front of Bucknell Hall, the 1886 chapel building that now houses the poetry center, with Elizabeth Alexander’s “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” (“Poetry is what you find/in the dirt in the corner,/overhear on the bus, God/in the details, the only way/to get from here to there”). Then the path strikes out for town, passing a cluster of three spectacular churches and Dorianne Laux’s “Dust” (“That’s how it is sometimes—/God comes to your window,/all bright light and black wings,/and you’re just too tired to open it”).

The route takes a hard right at the Post Office and Naomi Shihab Nye’s wonderful “The Story, Around the Corner” (“is not turning the way you thought/it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,/the way a child draws the tail of a pig”). Then it’s off under the Campus Theater’s neon nameplate to the park, the playground (where everyone can enjoy the punchline to Bruce Lansky’s “How I Quit Sucking My Thumb”), and the cemetery. The final stop is a busy crossroads marked by John Koethe’s elegant “The Proximate Shore” (“This afternoon at the symposium/Someone tried to resurrect the thesis/That a poem is a deflected sigh”).

“You wouldn’t believe how cheap it was,” says Shara McCallum, the Stadler Center’s director, of the poetry path. Including the panels, posts to mount them on, and payments to the authors for the recordings, the total cost was not much more than $10,000, she says. The biggest expense was her own time, spent in borough meetings and persuading various property owners to sign on. Now that the posts are in place, she plans to replace the poems with a new set every year.

Too often, “people think poetry is for the rare, the few, the chosen,” Ms. McCallum says. But it need not be. The Poetry Path, she says, is a way of making poems “art that’s in our daily experience.”

“Unity College’s focus is timely given the priority that President Barack Obama placed on the mitigation of global climate change during his second inaugural address,” the Maine college said in a news release. “Severe weather events from the devastating flooding in New York to record high temperatures across the globe have spiked public interest in the subject.”

The announcement gave few details, however, on how the new curricular focus would take shape at the college, or change what Unity already does.

With the rise of sustainability programs in higher education in recent years, the tiny college has garnered attention for its environmental programs. Unity made another splash recently when it announced it would drop its investments in fossil-fuel companies—one of few institutions to do so.

The College of New Rochelle, which opened a $28-million wellness center (above) in 2008, could be one example of what researchers describe as institutions caught up in an amenities arms race. Credit: ikon.5 architects

For the past 15 years or so, colleges have experienced a tremendous building boom, and the most publicized aspects of the boom have been the amenities: the climbing walls, the swank student unions, and the luxury dorms.

Even in the midst of a national financial crisis, the buildings seemed to get more opulent. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently noted the “resort living” on college campuses. A new residence hall at Saint Leo University, in Florida, features a 2,100-gallon aquarium, a relaxation room with futuristic “spherical nap pods,” big-screen televisions, and more, according to The Tampa Tribune. A Saint Leo sophomore called it “ridiculously amazing.”

Other people—particularly those predicting a shakeout for higher education—might call it just plain ridiculous. Shouldn’t higher education put more money into, um, education and less of this stuff?

That depends on the college, according to Brian Jacob, Brian McCall, and Kevin M. Stange, all at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they analyze the “college as country club” and the pressure on institutions to cater to students’ desire for “consumption amenities.”

To some extent, the Michigan researchers found what you might expect: “More selective schools have a much greater incentive to improve academic quality” because that is valued by the high-achieving students that they are trying to attract, the researchers write. “Less selective (but expensive) schools, by comparison, have a greater incentive to focus on consumption amenities.”

But one aspect of their conclusion is startling: The less-selective colleges might actually harm their enrollment by spending more on instruction. “One important implication is that for many institutions, demand-side market pressure may not compel investment in academic quality, but rather in consumption amenities,” they write. “This is an important finding given that quality assurance is primarily provided by demand-side pressure: the fear of losing students is believed to compel colleges to provide high levels of academic quality. Our findings call this accountability mechanism into question.”

In other words, one would think that market forces would reward colleges that invest in teaching and academics, and that we would have better colleges over all because of that market pressure. But it turns out, the researchers say, that prospective students of the less-selective colleges may care more about investment in the “resort” experience of college, and hence academic quality may not be enhanced by market forces.

The researchers say there’s a parallel in health care, “where patient amenities are a much stronger driver of hospital demand than clinical quality.”

Mr. Jacob, Mr. McCall, and Mr. Stange readily acknowledge that their paper does not address how those trends affect students and taxpayers. And they point to a need for more research on this market pressure, with a particular emphasis on the implications for competing institutions.

Surely, any close observer of higher education would recognize the effects of the building boom and their long-term consequences. A number of colleges have high debt loads and crippling deferred maintenance, which will become more burdensome as buildings age.

After noting the debt-rating downgrade at the College of New Rochelle last week, I couldn’t help but notice our previous coverage of the college: We had written up New Rochelle’s $28-million wellness center, designed by the well-known firm ikon.5, in 2008.

The amenities arms race may attract students and publicity in the short term, but in the long term the strategy might be a risky game.

A state judge in Montgomery County, Md., has ruled against a family who sued the Johns Hopkins University, seeking to block it from developing land that the family had sold to Hopkins in an effort to preserve it from rampant development.

Elizabeth Banks sold her Belward Farm to Johns Hopkins in 1988 at a tenth of the land’s value, with the understanding that the land would be used to build a campus. But the family of Ms. Banks, who died in 2005, says Hopkins’s current plan for 4.7 million square feet of development defies what she had intended. Her family was supported by neighbors, who were concerned about the traffic that the increased development might bring and offended by what they saw as the university’s disregard for Ms. Banks’s intentions.

The university maintained that the deed did not bar the planned development. Officials in Montgomery County, where there are other disputes over carving up farmland, had generally supported the university.

Both the university and the family had filed for summary judgment this year. In recent weeks, the family released statements accusing the university of characterizing Ms. Banks’s gift “not as a charitable donation, but rather as an arm’s-length real-estate sale.”

After the judgment in favor of the university, on Friday afternoon, Johns Hopkins released a statement saying that it was reviewing the decision and pushing ahead with the development. “We will proceed in a responsible manner, in consultation with the community and in support of Montgomery County’s vision for its economic development,” the statement said. “Johns Hopkins is, and always will be, grateful to Miss Banks and her relatives for the gift of their property. We have lived up to, and will always live up to, our agreement with them.”

The family announced on Monday that it would appeal. It called the ruling “an insult to the generosity of my family, ignores the history and facts of this case, and threatens the rights of donors everywhere.”

• ‘Common Sense’ Prevails in Federal Decision to Reimburse U. of Iowa for 2008 Flood Damage (read an earlier roundup here)

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 seeking to save on upfront costs, the porch is also available with a conventional roof that can later be replaced with solar panels as money becomes available.

As displayed at the decathlon, the house had 864 square feet of indoor space, with two bedrooms and a living-kitchen-dining space. A separate 120-square-foot module with a half bath could be used as an office, a studio, or another bedroom. The house’s solar panels produced 8.2 kilowatts of power.