Located at the center of campus, Bailey was the crossroads of the university’s private colleges to the west and public colleges to the east. Bailey Plaza, when it was a parking lot, served as a kind of barrier between the public and private sections of the institution. Now it is a connector, a social space, and passageway for all students, no matter their field of study or their annual tuition. The space has been reimagined as a link in the sustainable Founder’s Greenway running diagonally across the campus, a key element in the university’s 2005-2008 master plan. As a civic space at the foot of a neoclassical portico, it is at once a part of and a pause in the Greenway—a spot to move through or a place to sit and recharge.

A plaza is not a typical venue for incorporating local landscapes into a campus. But at Bailey Plaza, the characteristic elements of the Ithaca region—dramatic streams and gorges, forests, and bluestone walls—were interpreted in a spare, local vocabulary. The warm and varied pavers are made of locally quarried bluestone, an iconic upstate New York material. The planting palette features individually chosen specimens such as Kentucky coffee trees and evergreens often found in surrounding forests. Bailey Plaza shows how imaginative landscape architecture can combine hard and soft elements into a functional and welcoming whole.