From the issue dated November 6, 1998 |
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A Campus Planner Who Strives to Overcome 'the Curse of Asphalt'Adam Gross's firm designs green space for people and gets cars out of the way By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK It takes a brave architect to advise the University of Virginia on campus design.
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Beyond the Lawn, the pavilions, and the Rotunda, which are "pretty awesome," he says, Virginia has allowed many of the same blunders that he and his colleagues come upon again and again as they work on campus-development plans:
Street grids that are inhospitable to bicyclists and pedestrians, because the sidewalks are too narrow and the wide roadways too accommodating to fast-moving cars. Out-of-scale buildings that reflect the ego of a dean or a donor rather than the needs of the institution. Parking lots. Parking lots. More parking lots.
It's "the curse of asphalt," says Mr. Gross. He mock-grimaces at mention of the poorly placed parking lots marring the pastoral ambiance of Emory University, and of the sea of cars that discourage students and professors from crossing the University of Georgia on foot.
On many campuses, he says, it's not the distances that deter pedestrians. It's that "the quality of the walk is crummy."
For Virginia, his architectural firm has recommended overhauling sidewalks and landscaping on several streets, to soften the environment along the campus boundaries.
The firm also has proposed a landscaped brick "groundswalk," designed for pedestrians, bicyclists, and, on certain stretches, small buses. The walk would connect the vibrant central campus with a newer, less lively area called North Grounds, where the law and business schools are located.
After 15 years of working with colleges as an architect and campus planner, Mr. Gross, along with his colleagues at Ayers/Saint/Gross, has developed some pretty strong notions about what makes a campus appealing.
The planners also have a few thoughts about the financing and fund-raising strategies that institutions should pursue to create those kinds of places.
Those ideas are beginning to take hold among the firm's clients, as well as among the colleges advised by the dozen or so other campus-planning specialists that are suggesting such restoration plans.
Campus buildings shouldn't be thought of in isolation, says Mr. Gross. "The building edges form relationships" with adjoining spaces, he explains, and those spaces "should relate to the character of the place."
Trustees, presidents, and especially legislators haven't always given those intangible factors the attention they deserve. But all of those officials should be doing just that -- at least by including enough money in a building budget to allow for improvements to the surrounding areas, he says.
"What's important to most people is the space in between," says Mr. Gross, his voice racing with enthusiasm. "You're really talking about the democratic part of the campus that everybody shares in."
Public institutions face an additional hurdle, he notes, because in many states, legislators won't appropriate money for parking garages or dormitories. That, in turn, forces those campuses "to sprawl and build big parking lots."
For Mr. Gross, these are day-to-day concerns. The 57-person firm in which he is a principal, founded in Baltimore in 1915, works almost exclusively on college architecture and planning. And although that specialization wasn't entirely by choice -- the recession in the commercial real-estate market of the late 1980s helped the decision along -- Mr. Gross says he's discovered a certain richness in his dealings with colleges that he hasn't found in working with corporate clients.
Since shifting its emphasis, the firm has worked on campus plans for more than a dozen colleges, including research institutions, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and non-residential campuses, like Wor-Wic Community College.
"You're working for people who are kind of caretakers at these great places," he says. "They're not refinancing it and selling it off."
That respect extends to his own alma mater, Syracuse University, from which he graduated in 1978. Even during a periods of growth, officials there followed design guidelines, he says. Recently they've closed off several campus streets to daily traffic, to encourage walking. They've done one of the best jobs "of not screwing the campus up," he says.
Mr Gross is in a conference room in his firm's main office, 37 stories above downtown Baltimore. The walls are covered with maps and penciled schematics of proposed walkways and landscaping projects for the Universities of Georgia and Virginia. Scale models of those campuses and others, big as dining-room tables, stand in the corners, along with cardboard models of projects in the works, including a new natural-sciences building for Haverford College.
Nearby is his small office, where he keeps some of the 30 felt pennants he has collected from the colleges for which the firm has worked.
He doesn't spend much time in the office. As often as not, his work takes him to the campuses, where the scale models and tiny plastic renditions of dormitories, student unions, and stadiums give way to life-size structures, and to the real-world problems of the American university, circa 1998.
Many of those problems go beyond aesthetics. At Georgia, for example, the firm was called in to help the university figure out how best to accommodate the 5,000 additional students who are expected in the next 10 years.
"Georgia was freaked out when they hired us," Mr. Gross says. Officials feared that growth from the current enrollment of 30,000 would require developing the university's rural holdings. The campus, located in Athens, has about 11 million square feet of classroom, dormitory, library, and research space. Officials estimate that an additional nine million square feet will be needed to relieve crowding and accommodate growth.
In the wake of several traffic accidents -- including two in the past two years in which students were killed -- planners were also seeking a design that would help reduce the number of cars that are driven across the campus.
To the university's relief, Ayers/Saint/Gross concluded that Georgia would have more than enough room if it converted some of its parking lots into green space and building sites, and moved the cars into new garages, which would be built on the outskirts of the campus. The design approach is akin to the strategies that many cities are using to revitalize their downtowns.
The oldest part of the university, the North Campus, has a desirable "living and learning environment," says Mr. Gross. "The idea was to replicate a series of villages like that."
The firm also proposed redesigning an upper level of a proposed academic building into one stretch of a pedestrian bridge that would serve as a safe, convenient walkway across the campus.
Unlike Georgia, Emory has added a great deal of space to its main campus, in Atlanta, in the past 20 years, fueled by its flourishing endowment ($4.1-billion as of August 31) and an ambitious campaign to expand its research base. From 1991 through 1996, Emory spent some $250-million on new buildings and renovations on its 631-acre campus.
But as university officials acknowledge, some of the new construction isn't great. A lot of the additions were built "before anybody had a clear sense of how ugly they were going to be," says Gary S. Hauk, secretary of the university. Until recently, Emory had few rules to keep a dean or a school from going ahead with a project, "as long as the financing plan was in place and they had the architect selected."
A favorite target of criticism is "the link," a concrete corridor between two attractive old classroom buildings. Dating from the early 1900s, with marble-and-limestone walls and red-tile roofs, they are part of the original campus design by the respected architect Henry Hornbostel. "The link" is a much later addition.
Soon after arriving at Emory as president, in 1994, William M. Chace says he realized that the campus lacked a "comprehensive vision." Alumni, he adds, complained that "the campus look has been eroded."
Ayers/Saint/Gross spent about two years, beginning in late 1996, evaluating Emory's campus, in a process that included meetings with hundreds of students, professors, and deans, and lots of walking and looking. The planners examined architectural features of buildings, evaluated traffic and pedestrian patterns, and studied the paths of campus streams and the contours of valleys.
After a few months, they took over a big room in the law school and began tacking up pictures and drawings of cornices, light fixtures, and windows that they saw as architecturally representative of Emory. It was all a part of "getting to know it ourselves," says Earle L. Whittington III, project manager in the university's office of campus planning and construction.
At the same time, the planners were absorbing detail after detail of Emory's academic philosophy and ambitions. Mr. Gross copied some of the more poignant or lyrical comments into the sketchbook he always carries with him, so he could use them later to help recall an idea or reinforce a point.
Planners also met with the people who handle maintenance, trash collection, deliveries, and utilities, to be sure that the firm's designs wouldn't create unexpected problems.
The process paid off. "They won the respect and admiration of every group they talked to," says Mr. Chace. He is "absolutely convinced" that some of the ideas that were adopted, such as taking away professors' nearby parking spaces, would never have been accepted had it not been for the care that Mr. Gross and his colleagues took in explaining the overall benefit to the campus. "Everyone had a stake in this," the president says. "Nobody felt left out."
Emory contributed to the openness, posting information about its progress on a World-Wide Web site (http://www.emory.edu/FMD/PLAN/).
Although the firm does, in fact, pride itself on its inclusive approach to campus planning, Mr. Gross calls its methods pretty simple. "We're just like a big mirror," he says. "Or a good shrink."
All that analysis does not come cheap. The firm charges $100,000 to $600,000 for a full-scale campus plan, depending on the size of the campus and the time involved. That's a range that university clients say is in line with those charged by other firms. Total costs can be much higher, after fees for traffic engineers and space planners are added. Emory, for example, says it spent $1.2-million on its campus plan, including the consultants' fees and the costs of aerial photography and printing reports and maps.
Mr. Gross still visits the campus about once a month, to oversee final details of the master plan and to take part in discussions about a new nursing building -- for which his firm recently won the architect's contract.
As he walks the campus, easily recognizable by his long strides and the brown-leather backpack slung over one shoulder, professors and administrators call out greetings or walk up to say thanks.
The visits have been especially rewarding this fall, because he can see and feel how some of the firm's early ideas are working out. As a sign of commitment to the master plan, Mr. Chace started on some pieces of it even before the entire plan was completed.
Over the summer of 1997, Emory spent about $1.5-million to remove a 60-car parking lot in the center of the campus, at the edge of a forested stream. It redeveloped the site with grass, trees, and benches.
This past summer, it spent $2-million more to begin converting a thoroughfare called Asbury Circle into a bricked walkway for pedestrians, bicyclists, and quiet, electric buses. Emory plans to continue implementing parts of the plan, spending $1-million to $2-million at a time, each summer.
Mr. Gross says Emory's early support gave the plan a momentum that he doesn't always find. Campus plans don't work "unless you get people so excited about the future and show how easily it can get built," he says.
But, like any other architect, he notices imperfections. Crossing the campus with Jennifer Fabrick, who has been named to the new post of campus architect, he pauses in mid-sentence, points, and utters two words of chastisement: "Trash cans!"
Emory, it seems, has several different kinds of trash receptacles. Some months earlier, Ayers/Saint/Gross had recommended ditching most of them and going with a simple, black, wrought-iron style. The new cans are coming, Ms. Fabrick assures him.
His tour of Asbury Circle, which teems with students, also yields a small disappointment. "I thought this was going to be granite," he says to Mr. Whittington, tapping his shoe at the new curb. Administrators went with concrete, he is told; the granite was too expensive.
Emory is still working up the estimates for the cost of all of the proposals in the firm's plan. That will be no small sum, since it also involves some redesign of the area surrounding the university hospital and demolishing and rebuilding the university's graduate-student apartments.
Mr. Gross's clients aren't the only universities that are thinking anew about how they use their prime real estate. Last year, University of Indianapolis officials removed a 300-car parking lot from the center of its campus and converted the space into a five-acre pedestrian mall, featuring a sunken lawn, garden, and outdoor amphitheater.
Furman University, consulting with the campus-planning firm of Dober, Lidsky, Craig and Associates, of Belmont, Mass., is re-examining its parking lots and interior streets, with similar ideas about restoring what one official calls "the walking character of the campus."
It's a welcome trend, says Mr. Gross, even for colleges that have always catered to commuter students. And even more so, he adds, for residential institutions like the University of Virginia, which created the ideal but let it slip away.
Emory U. (main campus and Oxford College)
George Washington U. (campus-amenities plan)
Harford Community College
Medical U. of South Carolina
Old Dominion U.
U. of Georgia
U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
U. of Virginia
Virginia Tech (South Campus)
Washington College (Md.)
Wor-Wic Community College
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Section: Money & Management
Page: A52
Copyright © 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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