These are responses to a recent question on SCUP’s LinkedIn group. You may want to contribute to it?

The question: “Can someone recommend good master planning precedents for campuses that are more wooded, where the traditional collegiate green is not the best answer? I have looked at Wellesley, Mills, UC Santa Cruz and Woods Hole Quissett Campus. Surely there are others?” And some of the responses already:

• Neither Indiana or Kansas have traditional collegiate greens, and both have wooded areas.
• JCU and Griffith in Australia are good examples too (not woods but more jungle like - same theory can be applied though)
• I would look at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. Both have significant wooded areas on their campuses as part of the overall campus master plan. Here at Wisconsin, about a third (300 acres) of our main campus is within what we call the "Lakeshore Nature Preserve" which is mostly wooded as well. We have a master plan for the latter to manage vegetation and cultural resources along with academic research and outreach activities.
• Lewis & Clark College outside Portland, OR certainly comes to mind.
• You might also want to look at the master planned development of the UC Santa Cruz campus, set on a hill in a Redwood forest overlooking the city and ocean beyond. It was initially planned in 1964 and has undergone more recent planning updates. There are some very distinctive elements in their development guidelines. The campus architect Emeritus. Frank Zwart, FAIA, might be able to help you.
• Smith College. Arboretum master plan by Towers Golde.
• Swarthmore is largely arboretum. Guilford College in North Carolina has a tree filled center and large forested area.

• Cool Campuses? (PDF) by Walter Simpson (downloadable)
• The benefits of Guided Facility Self-Assessments by Keith O’Leary (if not APPA member, must read interactive PDF)
• A Study of State Tax Appropriations for Capital Needs in U.S. Public Higher Education (if not APPA member, must read interactive PDF)
• Can We Make a Difference in Campus Sustainability by Steve Glazner (if not APPA member, must read interactive PDF)
• The Facilities Stewardship Oversight Role of Governing Boards (PDF) by Lander E. Medlin (downloadable)

From Simpson’s piece, one important point: Deep energy conservation in existing facilities is a necessity

The cleanest BTU or kWh is the one we don’t consume. Thus, deep energy conservation should be the top priority in campusclimate action plans. However, most plans project modest conventional retrofits of existing buildings paired with larger-than-necessary purchases of renewable energy credits (RECs) and carbon offsets to eventually mop up the remaining energy waste. Paying someone else somewhere else to reduce emissions for you—as is the case with carbon offsets—does not model a strategy consistent with the task at hand, essentially quitting fossil fuels within a few short decades. That goal can only be achieved if energy users are successful at sharply curtailing and eliminating to whatever extent possible fossil fuel use on-site. 

Many tools and strategies are needed to achieve this objective, including submetering of buildings and even of individual building energy systems, so that the real effectiveness of conservation measures is accurately assessed and understood. The cost of submetering can be made up many times by the additional savings it allows facilities managers to achieve

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. 

Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) offers a wealth of useful resources and events. In its online publication, Volume V: Then, Now & In the Next Decade, the latest issue is titled Embracing the Right Questions: Planning Spaces for Science.

This entry also references parts of PKAL Volume IV: What Works, What Matters, What Lasts:

Anticipating Renovating: This seminar, in conjunction with the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIAA) and co-sponsored by Herman Miller, was part of a series of PKAL activities focusing on the relationship of space and learning. These questions and insights are being incorporated into planning for upcoming PKAL activities relating to planning facilities for undergraduate learners.

Asking the Right Questions: Toward Building Communities: Community is the spirited enactment of the conviction that ideas are important, and that they gain life when people bring different perspectives to their consideration. Communities embrace a common vision, yet allow— even promote— difficult dialogues. This is the challenge to leaders, within the faculty and the administration, as your planning proceeds.

Collecting Questions From the Field: Burning Questions from the 2006 Facilities Workshop: Meredith College

Understanding Key Questions: After more than a decade of significant activity in imagining, planning, constructing, and using new spaces for natural science communities on our nation’s campuses, it seemed prudent to step back, to ask if old questions are still relevant and what new questions are emerging. It seemed equally important to begin to gather thoughts of architects and other reflective practitioners from the design professional world about questions for the future.

Ouch. It's not hard to imagine the angst of being involved with the planning of this project:

For starters, what was supposed to be a $40-million project — with a $26-million contribution from the philanthropist Eli Broad, an alumnus — was at one point estimated at a whopping $160-million, according to the university’s president, Lou Anna K. Simon. The university’s associate provost for academic services, Linda Stanford, told the News that the design was being changed and that it would indeed end up “close to $40-million.”

As Scott Carlson puts it, in this article, "Now is a great time for colleges to get bids on construction projects — if they have the money to pay for them." It's nice to know that someone we know will be saving money. Bottom line: Materials costs are going down and construction people are offering lower cost bids. But not everyone is in a position to benefit:

Over the past several years, colleges have endured eye-popping escalation in the cost of campus construction, with the budgets swelling by more than 40 percent in some cases. The increases resulted from similarly rising costs for energy and petroleum-based building materials, and from growing demand for staples like steel and cement amid a booming construction market, both overseas and in the United States. Construction firms consistently bid high because of the demand for their work and to cover the risk of escalating costs on materials.

But times have changed. As the financial, housing, and major-construction markets have headed toward meltdowns, those same construction firms are looking for jobs, even while the prices of energy and materials have fallen. The prices of essential construction materials like structural steel, cement, and lumber are all expected to decline through 2009, according to Engineering News-Record, a trade magazine for the construction industry, published by McGraw-Hill. Because of those declines, building costs are likely to go down slightly this year.

This article's "blurb" ends with a phrase that we all should be thinking about as we slash and burn budgets of various sorts: "The governor's budget freeze has put state school projects on ice, but [W]ill it really save money? (emphasis added) And SCUPer Nancy Tinker of Eastern Connecticut State University is interviewed to help make the point:

But that's not how Nancy Tinker, director of facilities, management and planning at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, sees it. Tinker says an extra year will make a big difference, because time is money — money lost — and in "no place is that more true than in the construction industry."

"In the long run, unless you cancel a project altogether, you don't save anything by delaying things," says Tinker. "It actually costs the taxpayers more, or the taxpayers get less than they could have for the same amount of money."

To prove her point, Tinker cites ECSU's planned $71.5 million fine arts building, a project she describes as "critical" to the school's stated goal of becoming the state's premier public liberal arts college. Planning for the fine arts center was completed in 2000, when the cost was estimated at $54 million; eight years later it has gone up by $17.5 million, or 32 percent.

"When they finished the [planning] in 2000, they didn't think it was going to take eight years to get to the next phase," says Tinker.

We can't get at the precise final language of the House and Senate compromise on the stimilus package, but while there is lots of money in it - in various places - for higher education, the dollars intended for "shovel ready" renovation and upgrading projects seems to have turned into something like a handful of snowflakes in July: Some general dollars given to state governors to do with as they wish, without a restriction saying that they can't use them for upgrading facilities. One anonymous SCUPer writes to us:

Amazing as it is that the President, House of Representatives and a majority (albeit a simple majority) in the Senate wanted to fund nearly $16 billion for school construction, this stimulus opportunity was collapsed into the state stabilization funding *an increase of $6.6 billion in lieu of K12 funding and an increase of $3.4 billion to states in lieu of the higher ed facility funding. But the school districts will have to fight with the states over whether or not it gets spent on school construction, because there is no mandate to spend it in this way.

Few of the SCUPers we have spoken with today believe that much of those dollars will do anything but help governors do a slightly better job of balancing their budgets. Whether any of the dollars end up in facilities renovation depends pretty much on whatever system is currently in place within each state, and many governors have already shown their readiness to cut off building projects to move dollars elsewhere.

As one SCUPer commented this morning, "There's something in there (or not) to make just about anyone angry."

The designers among us will want to read this article. We wish we had time to follow the links in it.

In a recent Yale University podcast, Steve Kellert, professor at the university's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and editor of the book The Biophilia Hypothesis, speaks of biophilia as an essential part of sustainable design. The general concept of sustainable or green design focuses on minimizing or avoiding the harmful effects on the natural environment. Kellert's argument is, “that [it] is necessary but not sufficient to achieve sustainability. That if you achieve that effect in a building—a hermetically sealed skyscraper where people are working in windowless environments—that won't be sustainable because basically those environments do not produce physical and mental wellbeing.” (http://www.healthcaredesign magazine.com/YalePodcast)

Because physical and mental wellbeing is top concern for a hospital, exploring the biologically based bond between humans and nature is especially important in these environments where medical technology and products seem to be an antithesis to nature.

Sam Dillon wrote this article for The New York Times, which also has a special "Times Topics" Web section on the stimulus package.

The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.

The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.