2010 North Central Regional One-Day

The University of Chicago is developing an institution-wide sustainability program that has engaged the campus community.   Learn more about this process and efforts to mitigate the University’s footprint, raise awareness of environmental issues on campus, and advance an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability principles.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Discuss and explore the University of Chicago's institution-wide sustainability program.
2. Review the efforts to mitigate the University's footprint.
3. Identify the environmental issues faced on one campus.
4. Review and explain the advanced interdisciplinary approach to sustainable principles.

As infrastructure systems in facilities built during the sixties reach the end of their useable lives, the University of Wisconsin System, like most of higher education, has not been able to address backlog maintenance.  The existing maintenance funding program has only addressed maintenance in a piecemeal way, and has not addressed the need for programmatic remodeling at all, resulting in suboptimal use of funding and incomplete maintenance solutions.  A new Facilities Stewardship program has the intention of addressing backlog maintenance and programmatic obsolescence in a holistic way, by re-focusing maintenance funding towards fewer larger comprehensive projects.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Discuss and review the steps taken to implement the new Facilities Stewardship  program on the campus of University of Wisconsin System.
2. Evaluate how one University refocused maintenance funding, using a  new program to initiate better funding policies towards facilities.
3. Identify strategies for identifying areas of high risk to success.
4. Discover the criteria for pre-programming and pre-planning for successful facilities maintenance outcomes.

In 2008, the Iowa River swamped the University of Iowa during a series of national floods and storms that FEMA calls the fifth largest disaster in recorded U.S. history.  The disaster left the campus with $742 million in damages and costs. The university is now engaged in long-range efforts to replace or recover damaged buildings and infrastructure in a way that will minimize the impact of future floods.  People across the university and beyond are collaborating to rebuild a campus that will be resistant to flooding, resilient when inundated, and still beautiful and functional for daily use.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Explain strategies used on rebuilding facilities after a national flood disaster.
2. Discuss the development of long-range efforts to replace or recover damaged facilities and infrastructure.
3. Define cost estimating strategies that will ensure successful outcomes and minimize the impact of future floods.
4. Discuss collaboration efforts to rebuild, resilient, holistic buildings.
    

Chicago’s Loop and South Loop are home to over twenty institutions of higher learning serving 65,500 students – a 25% increase just since 2005.  It has long been the City of Chicago’s goal to encourage adaptive reuse of older buildings as well as an educational corridor in the South Loop as a way of creating a 24-7 downtown.  Columbia College Chicago is an excellent example of one of these institutions as it has created a 2.5 million square foot campus for its 12,000 students almost entirely within existing buildings -- many of which are designated historic structures -- in the South Loop.  Learn more about the overall context as well as how Columbia did that in this presentation by Alicia Berg, Vice President of Campus Environment at Columbia and former Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development.

 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Discover how Columbia College has interwoven itself into the fabric of the city.
2. Describe and explain the seven year transformation of the college, and it's vintage urban sprawl, along with the strategies for renovations.
3. Examine the physical campus, made up of almost two dozen buildings, and 2.5 million square feet, of infrastructure, transformed from industrilized facilities, into educational, sustainable facilities.
4. Analyze the purchase of available buildings in the South Loop, Chicago area; along with the sustainable renovations made to the buildings; a trend within higher education.

The rehabilitation of the former Carson Pirie Scott store into the Sullivan Center, is a store unto it’s self. Through stewardship the building has been re-established as a jewel on State Street. The entire façade had been restored and the building has been reconfigured to create first and second floor retail with an office building above. Our tour will take us through the Galleries and Studio space of the SAIC and the Gensler Chicago office, two new uses within this historic shell.