One of the many good things about the society's annual conference is the opportunity to learn from recipients of SCUP's awards, either in formal professional development sessions or more informal settings.

The SCUP's 2011 Excellence Award recipients have been announced. Congratulations to you all.

We're taking this opportunity to once more bring out information about the 2010 recipients, via SCUP's 2010 Tribute to Excellence newspaper. It is a useful resource that some may overlook, as are the web pages about the recipients. 

Fast Company magazine has a section devoted to the intersection of design and business. In it, Jack L. Robbins writes about Active Design. Here is, also, the Wikipedia article on Active Living by Design.

Given the size of the nation's obesity problem, intentionally integrating active design elements into every campus facilities and landscape planning process - especially in areas of student services, housing, pedestrian circulation, and so forth - seems a no-brainer. We've seen campuses to things that align with this philosophy, although unintentionally, or for other reasons. If you know of campus planning that has incorporated this in an integrated fashion, please share information about it in the comments, below, or in SCUP's LinkedIn group. Thanks.

Here's more from the Fact Company article:

Environments that are unwalkable are boring, feel vast and scaleless, and present blank unvaried views. Contrast a vast parking lot with a lively café-lined street and it’s clear what makes an environment walkable.

Variety and stimulation is especially important for the young digerati who have grown up in a wired world that brings a universe of entertainment and social interaction to them through a screen and a keyboard.

To motivate the under-25 crowd to use their legs—instead of their thumbs—to explore the world, the real world must compete with the digital one in terms of stimulation. Dense, multi-use urban environments with a variety of offerings can provide the stimulating surroundings that encourage walking and real-life social interaction.

More about Nugent Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specifically designed for the accommodation of students with very difficult disabilities.

Each of the rooms on the first floor, which houses 17 disabled students and three personal assistants, has adjustable hospital beds and high-tech accessibility features. The rooms have a motorized ceiling-lift system, which some of the students use to move from their beds to their bathrooms. Students slide or are helped into a sling suspended from the ceiling; then, with a remote-control device, they or their assistants activate the lift, which runs along tracks built into the ceiling.

The building is designed to integrate students with and without disabilities. The top three floors include disabled students who are able to live more independently, as well as students without disabilities, and both groups share the dining hall. A cardio room includes exercise machines that a student can use from a wheelchair. Buses stop at the dorm every half-hour during class times to take students anywhere on the campus.

Here is more from the university website. 

Charles A. Birnbaum says that there is a lack of landscape architecture criticim and media coverage, and, he says, writing in The Huffington Post, that's a problem.

Birnbaum is a keynote speaker at SCUP's national Campus Heritage Symposium next November 2-3 in Washington, DC.

Here's a game I like to play. Try to find decent criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design, particularly regarding public space, in any of the major US dailies. Go ahead... I'll wait why you think about that.

Actually it's no game... it's a problem, especially considering the role that landscape architecture and planning plays in shaping our communities and cities. We have no shortage of architecture critics (who on occasion cover landscape), and there are a fair number of garden writers, but criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design is essentially restricted to publications geared to professionals, and largely absent from major dailies.

So will design coverage in New York and elsewhere transcend traditional buildings as objects (Zaha's latest) or industrial design (sleek toasters and iPhones) and recognize the new possibilities that public landscape offers? The time is now for mainstream print and web to pick up on the signals in this white noise, because the future resides in systems-based design solutions that affect our everyday lives in new and sometimes unconventional ways. If not, design remains marginalized as a commodity and the public is poorly served.

This blog post by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer, notes that Case Western has narrowed the design field for its new landmark facility to four firms. Litt shares his provides insights into the challenges and issues of this new urban building and its placement among landmarks:

The site presents enormous physical and conceptual difficulties. It's irregular in shape. It includes a large underground parking garage, which serves Severance Hall and the Kelvin Smith Library. And it's surrounded by buildings in a variety of clashing styles, with oddly shaped outdoor spaces around them.

"We recognize that the building has to hold its own against some very prominent neighbors," Campbell said. "It's a tough problem to solve."

Severance Hall and the Cleveland Museum of Art are neoclassical, and date from the early 20th century, although the museum's expansion, designed by Raphael Vinoly, takes inspiration from the Brutalist architecture of Marcel Breuer, who designed a prior museum expansion in 1971.

The Kelvin Smith Library, designed by the Washington D.C. firm of Hartman Cox in the early 1990s, is a bland, post-modern neoclassical building. Nearby on Bellflower Road, there's Frank Gehry's explosively sculptural Peter B. Lewis Building, clad in shiny stainless steel.

The schizophrenic environment in part symbolizes CWRU's uneven and uncertain approach to architecture and campus planning in recent decades. The University Center represents an opportunity to pull everything together -- but it won't be an easy task.

A University of Colorado outpost, by architect Harry Weese, in Aspen, may be demolished. The school wants to close the Given Institute and sell it. The most likely buyer will pay $15M but only if the building is demolished first. It's a tough time for Modernist buildings in locations where people who actually have money want to put something else. It appears as though the only possible hope is that the city of Aspen might purchase it. But no one's real optimistic about getting residents to vote positive for that.

The dispute over the Given comes at a time of renewed interest in Weese, who died in 1998. A recent article in Chicago magazine chronicled the architect’s thriving career in the 1960s and 1970s and his alcohol-fueled decline. And architectural historian Robert Bruegmann has written the forthcoming bookThe Architecture of Harry Weese, the first critical study of the architect’s work.

Bennington College for the Student Center, with Taylor & Burns Architects; also Reed Hildebrand Associates Inc.; The Collaborative Engineers; Acentech; Otter Creek Engineers, Inc.; Ricca/Newmark Design - was a recipient of an Honor Awards in the 2010 SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture for a New Building category.

The charge was to create a Big Room for student social and performance uses; expand the café to increase capacity and life safety; accommodate organized student activities; create a new dining hall and kitchen for daily food service; connect existing buildings into a vibrant social center on the site of a parking lot; improve definition of the campus core while pushing cars to the campus edge ... .

The Big Room is a flexible open space that supports student and campus activities including social and academic gatherings; food service; readings and recitals; dance parties; demountable stage for corner or thrust formats; theatrical sound and light control booth; green room; and adjustable acoustics and daylight with motorized curtain.

The jury said, “ . . . very elegant courtyard . . . planning is significant portion of architecture and vice versa . . . fits nicely in campus plan . . .”

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to Signs That Work: Hospital Wayfinding.

Hospitals are complex spaces. An innovative student project at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design has been working on a set of symbols that it is hoped will be adopted universally, to help patients and others more effectively find their way. The symbol at right indicates mental health services. Student teams on this project are also working on the campuses of California Polythechnic State University, Iowa State University, and Kent State University. This story reveals some of the pedagogical benefits of a project intended to improve the effectiveness of facilities planning, specifically wayfinding. The symbols will also be useful in virtual spaces.