Renovation projects mix educational, financial, and aesthetic goals
In the 1960’s, the nation’s colleges were hit by an explosive growth in student population -- the baby boomers were coming of age, and a greater proportion of that generation was going to college, compared with every generation before it. There were two million students going to college in 1947; in the 60’s, there were four million.
Not having much time, colleges responded almost uniformly, with an architectural style that reflected the notions of the era: boxy, unadorned, bureaucratic-looking buildings. Just about every campus has them -- undistinguished structures with inconspicuous entrances and long, narrow hallways. They were made out of concrete, faced with brick and monotonous rows of rectangular windows.
That architecture, which flourished during the cold war, now seems as outdated as a bomb shelter. Colleges are wondering what to do with those buildings.
Many passersby would call for the wrecking ball. These Modernist, often monolithic buildings haven’t earned the sort of reverence that students, faculty members, and alumni have for countless Old Mains, central quads, and Founders Halls around the country.
Beyond aesthetics, many of the 60’s-era buildings just don’t work today. Their designers did not anticipate, for starters, the technological age. With their dense concrete skeletons, squat spaces between floors, and energy-leaking walls of glass and (often corroding) metal, the buildings are requiring massive investments to make them useful again.
“One of the fundamental problems is whether higher education can afford to tear them down and replace them with something new in the near future,” says Richard P. Dober, a well-known campus planner and consultant based in Belmont, Mass. Colleges better make do, he says, “because there is nothing that suggests that higher education is going to get infusions of cash to replace them.”
Whether colleges have learned from the 60’s is important to their future. Some are once again going through a growth spurt because of another population explosion. And some campus planners wonder if colleges will make the same mistakes -- ignoring the long view and building for the moment and on the cheap.
That certainly was part of the problem during the 60’s, says Mr. Dober, who laid out and chronicled the face of the American campus in his seminal work, Campus Planning, and in his latest, Campus Architecture.
“In many ways it was the equivalent of a catastrophic event,” Mr. Dober says. “Suddenly, we have a million to a million and a half students and no place to put them. It’s like an earthquake that wipes out a town -- you have to provide tents and shelter.” Buildings went up quickly, and administrations were often unprepared to shepherd a structure through the design and construction stages.
In a 1996 report, the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers estimated that, in 1994, about 26 percent of the space on college campuses -- about 1 billion square feet -- was constructed in the 1960’s. By comparison, colleges built 22 percent of their campuses before 1951, 12 percent during the 50’s, 18 percent during the 70’s, 15 percent during the 80’s, and 7 percent from 1991 to 1994.
“The institutions, especially the public institutions, were under pressure to acquire funds to build anything,” Mr. Dober adds.
Today, colleges are pouring money into these old structures. Take, for example, a $13-million renovation of Boyd Hall, a 54,000-square-foot science building at Plymouth State College, in New Hampshire. Boyd is vintage 1969, a brick box with slit windows.
Its spaces between floors are only about 12 feet, about 2 feet less than what today’s modern laboratory-ventilation systems require. Mitchell / Giurgola Architects, a leading firm in the higher-education market, has designed a 36,000-square-foot addition, which will house the labs and offer a more contemporary entrance. The older portion of the building will become classrooms and offices, and is being stripped out and refurbished with new heating and cooling systems, new fire-extinguishing systems, and new telecommunications wiring.
William Haverly, the director of planning and development for the University System of New Hampshire, says that renovating Boyd Hall might have been cheaper than tearing it down and rebuilding it. The main reason the university decided to renovate, however, was because it couldn’t find space for the displaced classrooms and offices during the two or more years it would take to rebuild. Under the renovation plan, the university will build the new structure, then use it for classes and offices as it strips out the old building.
Unlike many of its contemporaries, Boyd Hall does not have one of the signature touches of Modern, or International Style, architecture -- walls of glass. But Steven M. Goldberg, a partner at Mitchell / Giurgola, says that he almost always recommends replacing such walls anyway. The glass used in those days brings in plenty of light but does nothing to help regulate temperature or keep out noise. And the wall was usually put together using untested materials that, these days, are beyond repair and falling apart.
Sometimes, what starts out as a facelift ends up being more than skin-deep. While he was a facilities director for the State University of New York System, Mr. Haverly worked with Broome Community College to refurbish one of its aging structures, Titchener Hall."It was right at the front entrance of the campus,” he says, “and lots of people don’t find 60’s architecture attractive.” In the early 60’s, the 42,000-square-foot building cost about $700,000 to build; in 1993, SUNY spent $5-million to tear it down to a structural-steel skeleton and build it anew, with a contemporary style and new facilities designed by Einhorn Yaffee Prescott.
Charles J. Quagliata, vice president for student and community affairs at Broome, says the institution kept the existing structure because the state was only paying for renovations, not new construction. “If I had to do it over again, I would have knocked the damn thing down,” he says, adding that the old building had few windows, a moldy basement, and dark hallways. Still, he’s says the finished form is “quite dandy.”
A similar renewal took place at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There, the Undergraduate Library’s glass facade overlooked the main campus green, across from several ornate early-20th-century buildings. Over the years, the library had been known by many students, faculty members, and staff by an unflattering abbreviation: UgLi. In 1995, the university tore off the shabby glass wall and replaced it with a contemporary red-brick front. The renovation, which included new mechanical systems, added 40,000 square feet of space and cost $11-million.
At the Boston Architectural Center, whose building is another product of the 60’s, renovations carry with them a thorny question: What does it say to students if a college of architecture abandons its past? Buildings are often considered a physical record of architectural history, but it just so happens that the center emerged from the pavement “like a basaltic extrusion,” says the college’s current president, Ted Landsmark.
It is an anomaly at the corner of Newbury and Hereford Streets in Boston’s tony Back Bay -- to many, a dull-gray concrete tumor growing out of a street lined with Victorian brownstones.
“When it was built and when tour buses went by, it was described as an eyesore,” he says, but he believes that people will one day appreciate the brutal aesthetic.
Aesthetics aside, however, the center has struggled over what to do with this relic, which needs updating and has been an inflexible, “cavelike” working space.
The 60’s campus-architecture boom came after an aesthetic transformation in architecture. The Modernist architects of Europe -- including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who both fled Nazi Germany -- had settled in America and brought their austere designs with them. These stylists sought to create an architecture of the machine age, rejecting the hoary conventions of the past and relying on the latest building technologies.
The icons of the field produced memorable work, such as Paul Rudolph’s architecture building at Yale University and Mies’s Modernist campus at the Illinois Institute of Technology. By the 1960’s, the sleek International Style, as it came to be known, was everywhere. Unfortunately, its relatively inexpensive construction also spawned countless mediocre and half-hearted structures.
“I sort of cut my teeth on 60’s architecture,” says Mr. Goldberg, of Mitchell / Giurgola.
These days, Mr. Goldberg and his colleagues spend their energies reworking, updating, and undoing that legacy. His firm has refurbished 60’s buildings at Columbia University, Long Island University, Queens College of the City University of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania, where they have gutted buildings, replaced ventilation systems, added new wings, and transformed appearances with new skins.
“They were very straightforward buildings,” he says, and as a result, they can be outfitted for a new purpose -- as long as the new role is proximate to the old one. A 60’s science laboratory, for example, will probably never be a theater, but it could become a humanities classroom building.
A less straightforward building is that of the Boston Architectural Center, which administrators have decided to embrace, with a few improvements to advertise to passersby that the center is in fact a college. The center took $1-million left over from refinancing its mortgage and hired an interior-design firm to rearrange and make visible its offices and lobby. Student mailboxes were moved into the lobby, so that students would circulate there. Administrative offices were replaced by a bright meeting room, enclosed in thick, crystal-clear glass; students present projects here for critique. In the original design, the center of the main floor sank a few feet, with stairs on all sides; the new designers lifted it into view for the passing public. The new floor is flat, and accessible to wheelchairs. Above the gallery, a meeting room on the mezzanine was transformed into a cafe.
The crowning addition is a bright yellow wall that flanks one side of the presentation room. Artisans were brought in from New York to apply yellow plaster to the wall by hand. It has a 2-foot-square hole punched in its center. “I wanted people to ask, What is that?” Mr. Landsmark says, adding that the wall brings a soft, human touch and a sense of incompleteness to a building that can otherwise be as dead and solid as a gravestone.
Despite the animation offered by the new critique room and other renovations, students still complain: The building is freezing most of the time. The windows have condensation problems and can’t keep out the sound from the street. The concrete floor is noisy. The library is running out of room. Ceiling tiles are falling in. A lone elevator is slow and battered.
Whether at elite architecture schools in Boston’s Back Bay or at a community college in the rural Southwest, 60’s structures are proving their limitations. South Plains College, in Levelland, Texas, was established in 1957 with five buildings, and doubled in size during the 60’s. In the past four years, the college’s enrollment has grown by about 30 percent.
So South Plains is using the cushion of new building to make room for renovations, and juggling spaces. For example, a new student-services building will allow the college to clear out the third floor of a 60’s library, which will become classrooms. A new fitness center will free up a women’s gym, built in 1958, which will become a teaching and learning center.
Dormitories built in the 60’s come with their own problems. Michael Bass is an architect who specializes in redesigning old buildings for Cutler Associates, a construction and architecture firm. Lately, he’s refurbished a number of dormitories, including four 60’s buildings at Clark University, designed by the Architects Collaborative, which was founded by Gropius.
When he assesses a 60’s building, he looks at disability access, lighting, plumbing, telecommunications capacity, and -- a big issue recently -- sprinkler systems. The electrical systems are usually inadequate, he says, because students bring all sorts of appliances to college these days: computers, cell-phone chargers, microwave ovens, CD and DVD players, and video-game consoles. (Ira Fink, a campus-planning consultant in California, says two college roommates bring between them an average of 18.6 items that need outlets.)
Clark’s old dormitories were so outdated that they still had their original 60’s furniture in them. The university gave the buildings new furniture, lighting, plumbing, telecommunications and electrical wiring, windows, and some kitchens. Paul Bottis Jr., director of the physical plant at Clark, says the university spent only $3.5-million on 150,000 square feet of space and completed it over the course of two summers.
Of course, some of these boxy structures never make it to another life. In 1952, the University of Oregon’s business college built a drab 46,000-square-foot addition between two older halls, which blocked a vital gateway laid out in the campus master plan. The floors were too short for today’s ventilation, and they didn’t line up and were thus inaccessible to people with disabilities.
For the business college, the biggest drawback was the proportion of the classrooms, which didn’t fit today’s teaching style. In the old days, says Christopher C. Ramey, the university’s architect and planner, rooms were built for a professor who lectured at the front of the class. The business college wanted a semicircular classroom design, which would promote collaboration and discussion between students and instructors.
So the university will spend $40-million to demolish the old building and put in its place a 136,000-square-foot structure that offers improved classrooms and a grand entrance to the campus. The new building will also use natural light and ventilation, cutting energy consumption to about half that of an average campus building.
However, despite their difficulties, the buildings of the 60’s aren’t necessarily less well-made or less adaptable than some charming prewar structures. Mr. Bass says he’s seen 100-year-old buildings with floor supports that the builders never bothered to connect to the walls.
“You’d think that because it’s been standing that long, it’s really sturdy,” he says. “But the reality is, it’s about to fall down.”
Mr. Bass says that since the 60’s, especially in the past 10 years, colleges have started to build structures that can accommodate different kinds of tenants.
“Back in the 60’s, you looked at a residence hall as a residence hall. You looked at an academic building for one specific use,” he says.
Colleges and universities have started to think more like businesses, he says. “What that means in terms of building today is, how can I get the most flexibility and manipulability for my construction dollar?”
There were some institutions, even in the 60’s, that kept an eye on the future and built flexible structures, says O. Robert Simha, a longtime planner for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is now writing a book about its campus.
As he walks through M.I.T., he points out some of the buildings that have been retooled for new lives. One late-50’s structure might have seen better days -- its whitewashed cinderblocks look dingy, and the Boston ivy outside is growing through gaps in the windows and snaking through the radiators.
But Mr. Simha points up at the ceilings: “That’s a 13-foot-plus height -- a typical requirement of M.I.T. buildings,” he says. This building can, and will, be used for something new.
Still, Mr. Simha wonders if some institutions, including his own, will make some of the same mistakes they made 40 years ago.
Campuses are once again in the midst of a construction boom that rivals that of the 60’s. At the same time, many of the planners who were working then have retired, and some administrations are cutting their planning offices in favor of private firms. Mr. Simha’s own planning office was recently dissolved.
“In those institutions that have passed on the knowledge, then you have some insurance. But in most cases, they don’t. Many of the people who are making the decisions now are starting from scratch.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A23
