Making Better Use of Existing Space Can Bring Major Savings

Chicago — There is a saying among architects and planners who focus on sustainability: “The greenest building is the one that never gets built.”

A theme here at the Society for College and University Planning conference has been effectively utilizing space on campuses. Many colleges are not operating at anywhere near the capacity of their spaces, and could realize significant savings by using more of their rooms more of the time.

Phillip Rouble, the facilities-planning specialist at Algonquin College, detailed ways that his college made better and more frequent use of space on its campus. Algonquin has room-utilization goals of 85 percent for classrooms, 80 percent for computer labs, and 70 percent for other labs. Rooms are scheduled from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Administrators considered opening rooms to scheduling from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday, but administrators backed off that plan.

The college avoided building some 1.26 million gross square feet of new space by scheduling more classes and labs in empty rooms. Mr. Rouble says the savings are stunning: He estimates that the college has saved $500-million in buildings that were never built — and also never cleaned, lit, heated, maintained, etc. Of course, some existing spaces had to be renovated — an old welding shop, for instance, was turned into a health-sciences simulation center.

Many faculty members and departments treat space as an asset to be protected jealously. Mr. Rouble says that planners on the campus had to emphasize again and again that space is a collective asset and that people need to consider the good of the college first. The new interest in sustainability was also a selling point.

During the planning process, Mr. Rouble and others put up maps of the facilities on the campus and color-coded the rooms: green rooms were well utilized, yellow less well utilized, and red poorly utilized. Planners and administrators realized that the poorly utilized spaces generally belonged to troubled programs on the campus. —Scott Carlson