Latest campus master plan
is not the first

By Sharron Hannon

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. So when it was time to draft a physical master plan to accommodate expected enrollment growth over the next five to 10 years, planners first took a look at how the campus had developed to date.
“The process [of developing a master plan] is about imagining--imagining the future,” says planning consultant Adam Gross of the Baltimore firm of Ayers/Saint/Gross. “But first you have to remember the past.”
To rediscover past plans, Gross turned to a 1990 dissertation written by Tom Bowen, assistant vice president for academic affairs and a member of the current physical master plan committee, titled “Room to Grow: A Historical Analysis of Physical Growth at the University of Georgia, 1785--1990.”
Bowen’s dissertation noted that the first campus master plan was requested by Walter Hill, who served as president of the university from 1899 to 1905, as the campus expanded from 36 to 1,200 acres. Hill took a 1904 train trip from Athens to Wisconsin to look at the agricultural school there. When he returned, he hired Charles Leavitt to draw up a master plan, which was presented in 1905 in the Chapel.
At that time, the university already had one building that was almost 100 years old: Old College, built in 1806 and modeled after Yale’s Connecticut Hall because UGA President Josiah Meigs, like his predecessor Abraham Baldwin, was a Yale man.
“Old College is like Connecticut Hall in scale, elevation and relationship to the community,” says Gross, noting that the building sits parallel to Broad Street. “Having perpendicular and parallel buildings is one of the great rules of campus planning.”
The strength of North Campus, he notes, is that the buildings--most of them constructed in the 1800s--frame and define the open space of the quadrangle. And the location of this scenic area just across the street from the main downtown eating and shopping district creates what Gross terms “one of the greatest college towns in America.”
In planning for future expansion beyond North Campus, Leavitt sited the axis that became D.W. Brooks Drive as a long vista flowing downhill from Conner Hall, which was completed in 1909. But during the ’30s and ’40s, the campus began to sprawl south--sometimes haphazardly--as buildings, many of them temporary WPA projects, were erected to support the war effort.
The next development plan, drawn up in the late ’50s, was influenced by contemporary European ideas that buildings should be expressive and machine-like rather than classical. A few years later, the physics, chemistry and geography-geology buildings were built on South Campus, creating what Gross terms a “train wreck” (because the aerial view of the buildings’ architectural footprints, indeed, looks like a derailment).
This very different approach from the classical styling of North Campus accentuated the differences between the two campuses.
Things might have gotten even stranger, since the next master plan--crafted in the 1960s--was predicated on having a monorail system circling campus, with a road slicing right through the North Campus quadrangle. Fortunately, that plan was abandoned when another university landed the monorail and the federal funding that went with it.