By Beth Roberts

In numerous large and small meetings Nov. 11 and 12, the university community--and the community beyond the university--was invited to respond to a preliminary version of the physical master plan for UGA for the coming decades.
In general, the campus response was enthusiastic. The plan envisions a recommitment to pedestrians and bicycles and a de-emphasis on automobiles, with parking and vehicle traffic relegated to the outer edges of campus.
The presentations were made by Adam Gross of Ayers/Saint/Gross, the Baltimore firm which served as consultants on the plan’s preparation, with the assistance of members of the university committee overseeing the development of the plan.
“We’re a mirror on the campuses we work for,” Gross said as he began his presentation. “This is truly your master plan. What you’re going to see here is a response to what you’ve said are the problems.”
According to Danny Sniff, director of the Office of University Architects, plan development actually began in summer of 1997. Staff from Ayers/Saint/Gross spent three days each month on campus, meeting with members of the university community. In the year and a half since the project began, they have held 250 meetings and interviewed about 2,500 people--deans and faculty, student groups, staff and administrators. They studied UGA’s history (see story below), rode the campus buses and visited classes, familiarizing themselves with life at UGA. They conducted informal ad hoc interviews with students walking around campus, asking often “Why did you choose the University of Georgia as the place to come to school?”
Former UGA President Charles Knapp was interviewed before he left Athens, and President Michael F. Adams has met with the planning group and walked the campus with them, sharing ideas about the use of space at a research university.
The Athens--Clarke County government is also developing a master plan, and the UGA planners have worked with Athens-Clarke planners to make sure the plans complement each other.
This extensive background research resulted in a list of nine principles, intended to guide decisions about campus facilities over the next several decades (guiding principles).
“We were trying to develop principles that could be maintained easily over a long period of time,” Sniff explains. Although detailed proposals are included in the plan, it is the broad principles that will guide decisions about specific projects in the years to come.
The student learning center already planned for the intersection of Baxter and Lumpkin streets will be designed with these principles in mind. Gross proposes a pedestrian bridge through the top of the new building, and a second new building next door, to make walking from North Campus to South Campus more feasible.
To some extent, these principles are already guiding construction at UGA. The improvements to Jackson Street, now under way, are a case in point: widening sidewalks, installing bike lanes, eliminating surface parking and burying utility lines.
One proposed element that could be implemented fairly soon, according to Sniff, is the elimination of the parking lot at the end of Herty Drive, returning the space bounded by Candler Hall, Moore College and New College to the leafy quadrangle that served as a playing field for 19th-century students.
In general, the plan calls for removing parking from center areas of campus to new parking decks built on the outer edges. Space formerly occupied by automobiles, Gross says, can be used for classroom buildings, residence halls and offices as the campus grows to accommodate 35,000 students in the first decade of the 21st century (one possible scenario)
Similarly, streets that now run through campus will be lined with trees and rededicated to pedestrians and bicyclists. Although the space must still accommodate emergency and delivery vehicles, buses and private autos can be removed from the mix. For example, the consultants were enthusiastic about ideas for D.W. Brooks Drive developed by Leo Alvarez’s environmental design students as a class assignment.
Because Ayers/Saint/Gross specializes in architectural planning for colleges and universities, Gross was able to offer comparisons with other campuses.
“UGA does probably the best job of any university in America in caring for its space,” he says, “but it’s remarkable that there aren’t more opportunities to bike on this campus. The best campuses for biking are Cornell, the University of Washington and the University of Colorado at Boulder--despite bad weather and hilly topography.”
Buses, like cars, could be routed on the outer perimeter of this walkable campus. Within the perimeter, the precinct concept--North Campus, South Campus, and so on--would be enlarged to apply to the whole university, with residence halls in each precinct keeping all areas of campus lively.
“An extraordinarily low percentage of students live on campus,” Gross says, compared to other large research universities. Residential campuses offer a sense of intellectual community that commuter campuses can’t match, and current housing office efforts to upgrade residence halls at UGA recognize that need.
Adding parking decks may not sound like a positive step, but Gross offered examples from other campuses--in particular, the University of Virginia, where Ayers/Saint/Gross is also serving as a consultant--where classroom and other buildings wrap around and over parking decks.
“We have to think about these parking decks as buildings,” says Gross. “They are part of the campus aesthetic.”
UGA’s master plan was developed in response to a directive from the board of regents two years ago. Master plans for each institution in the University System of Georgia will guide capital construction on each campus, and this plan, refined by campus suggestions following these meetings, will be submitted to the regents next February.
The goal: a campus that feels like North Campus everywhere, and that is loved as North Campus is loved.
“There is extraordinary love for this place,” Gross says. “As someone who spends time on college campuses, I felt it in a very palpable way.”