In a valley where “summer” begins in April and its scorching heat doesn’t relent until October, one of the guiding principles in planning the new campus of the University of California here was decidedly simple: Design against the sun.
It wasn’t the only one. The planning team focused on having the campus developed in a series of “simple grids” that would reflect the typical design of the agricultural towns that dot the surrounding San Joaquin Valley, according to John Lund Kriken, the architect who led the effort.
They wanted the layout of the campus, and the buildings themselves, to “convey the values of environmental sustainability” through designs that would minimize the use of energy, water, and other resources. That idea was inspired by the location, although the planners were also mindful that university leaders had initially proposed to build the new campus and its adjacent residential community in a different location that drew strong objections from environmentalists, some of whom also object to the present site.
The team aimed for a design that was both simple and flexible, in the hope that, as Mr. Kriken says, doing so would keep future generations of administrators from letting the plan “fall apart” over the next 25 years. That is the expected time span for completion of the 910-acre campus. (For a sense of scale, 640 acres constitute a square mile.)
The planners also considered loftier goals. “We thought the campus of the 21st century should have soft edges,” says Mr. Kriken, a partner in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. “We didn’t want enclaves” with science buildings clustered in one area and humanities and social sciences off in another, he explains. “We want things to mix up.”
Still, concern about the sun and the heat was never far from their minds. “We thought about that a lot,” Mr. Kriken says.
Making Use of the Lake
When the campus opens this fall on about 100 acres of a former golf course, many of those bigger design principles won’t be easy to recognize. But even now, months before the first 1,000 students begin classes, signs of the defend-against-the-heat strategy are readily apparent.
The academic buildings, for example, are designed with upper stories that extend beyond their ground-floor entrances, creating shaded walkways. Those arcades are already visible in the outlines of the first structures: the partially built library, the science building, and the classroom building. At completion the outsides of the arcades will be outfitted with sunshades: louvered panels of glass, treated in a ceramic coating that deflects heat but lets in light.
The location of the first academic buildings, walkways, and dormitories also follow the stay-cool strategy: Located south and east of the county’s nearby Yosemite Lake Park, they are oriented to take advantage of the cooling powers of the brisk afternoon breezes that typically cross the lake.
The lake is just one body of water that the campus will rely on to mitigate heat. The planners also elected to leave intact several irrigation canals that cross the site. In future phases of the campus, planners envision fitting grids of buildings and streets within the boundaries of the canals. “The grids interacting with the curving canals gives it an artful quality,” says Mr. Kriken.
Phase 1 has less of that “grid” feel, says Mr. Kriken, because the university has yet to obtain the necessary environmental permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and so could only build within the boundaries of the old golf course, for which it didn’t need approval.
When the campus is ultimately completed, says Mr. Kriken, it will be a “great victory” if people never realize that it began on this “crazy-shaped piece of land.”
‘Social Heart’ of the Campus
Already, one of the vital elements of the plan is in place. Mr. Kriken says planners see the ground-floor public spaces of the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library and the pedestrian Main Street that runs alongside it as the “social heart” of the campus. The street now runs along the outer northwest edge of the campus but will eventually be surrounded by buildings as later phases are developed.
The plan calls for about 17 percent of the site to be devoted to academic buildings, a comparable amount for athletics and recreation, nearly 30 percent for student housing, and 10 percent for faculty housing. A total of about 13 percent will be occupied by buildings that house student services and facilities management, including a power plant that is nearly completed. The campus will be designed to be pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, but the plans also include about 147 acres of parking along its outer edges.
All that development is hard to picture today, with only a few of the first buildings of the first phase close to completion.
Furthest along are the dormitories and Terrace Center and Valley Dining, two adjacent buildings meant for socializing and eating. The university will open with beds for 400 students in a complex of 11 suite-style dorms. Each residence will be named after a nearby county.
The 174,000-square-foot science-and-engineering building won’t be ready until the spring of 2006, and work won’t start until this summer on a 33,000-square-foot recreation center. But the 92,000-square-foot classroom building and the 179,000-square-foot library should be ready by the fall.
Like the other academic buildings, the library’s exterior will feature a lot of glass and concrete. It will also be the tallest building on the campus, topped with a glass-enclosed design element dubbed “the lantern,” to be visible from miles away, especially at night. Planners hope it will be “a soft evening landmark,” says Mr. Kriken, whose firm also helped design the library. (For more on the library, see the article on Page A24.)
Back on the ground, there are plans for the kinds of signature public spaces and plazas that have become the focal points of other University of California campuses, such as the main quad at Los Angeles and Sproul Plaza at Berkeley. The first of these will be a grassy quad, bordered by trees, to be set within the U-shaped area bounded by the library, the classroom building, and the science-and-engineering building.
It is “roughly the size of the quad at UCLA,” says Lindsay A. Desrochers, vice chancellor for administration. “It’s our Sproul.” She has supervised much of the construction.
Ms. Desrochers says the university has spent about $280-million so far. The figure includes about $77-million for planning and infrastructure, including a hard-to-miss water tank that can hold two million gallons. Another element of the infrastructure, which few people will ever see but which is vital to the existing and future development of the university, is a 700-foot-long underground tunnel that crosses the campus between the science building and the power plant.
The tunnel, which is 12 feet in diameter, was the first thing built on the campus and carries water lines, heating and cooling pipes, and racks of shelves for fiber-optic cables and other kinds of wiring. The tunnel eliminates the need to dig up the campus should the university need new utilities or wiring for a future generation of technology. It is also arranged so that it can be extended for later phases.
The water tank is a key part of the university’s plans to keep its energy costs low, and of its overall goal of “sustainability.”
The tank will serve as a central source of chilled water for air-conditioning throughout the campus. “We can chill that water at night, when the rates are low,” says Cynthia Hughes-Doyle, who holds the title “director of environmental stewardship” at the university.
At campuses where planners aren’t starting from scratch, she explains, “there’s a chiller in every building,” which adds to capital and operating expenses.
Going for Silver
The university has designed the campus with the goal of attaining “silver” status under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, a point system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council to rank how friendly a building is to the environment. (The gold and platinum levels of LEED are more difficult to reach.)
The program works by assigning points in different categories. For example, the university hopes to earn points for its plans for energy efficiency and for using 20 percent to 30 percent less water than a typical campus might. It will do that by using flushless urinals and high-quality valves and pipes that cut down on water leakage throughout the system.
Offices are being designed with windows that open, and with sensors that will recognize when a window has opened and switch off the heat or air-conditioning in response. Other sensors will keep track of energy usage room by room at all times. Ms. Hughes-Doyle says that will allow students and faculty members in environmental-engineering programs to use the campus as a living laboratory -- and win the campus LEED points for innovation.
To curtail light pollution, the university is using outdoor fixtures that focus the illumination downward. And to capture points in the category of materials, it has bought carpeting made with 37-percent recycled materials, with an understanding that once it is worn through, the manufacturer will take it all back and recycle it again. Ceiling tiles and flooring also feature recycled content.
Ms. Hughes-Doyle estimates that meeting the environmental standards increased costs by 2 percent to 5 percent. As a result, university leaders looked to other places to save money: lower-grade countertops for the bathrooms, for example, and a bit less carpeting and a bit more linoleum in some buildings. “Nothing’s going to look like the MGM Grand out there,” she says.
She says the process of cutting costs was “totally reversed” from what typically takes place. Usually, she says, developers “cut all the things you can’t see” like upgrades in mechanical systems. Here, “we went after the finishes.”
Once the campus opens, the “sustainability” efforts will continue in a number of ways, including the use of environmentally friendly products for maintaining the buildings and managing the landscaping. “We can’t just spray Lemon Pledge and Roundup,” she says.
One notable “green” step that the university is not taking is the use of solar power. Ms. Hughes-Doyle says that the constraints of the existing, odd-shaped site didn’t allow for placing buildings in the best possible locations to collect solar energy, but that it may be introduced in later phases when the campus “breaks out of the amoeba” shape. By then, she says, the university also hopes that the state will be willing to provide the extra money needed to invest in solar technologies.
The Opponents
Meanwhile, a determined group of campus opponents continues to work to keep those later phases from materializing.
Two local organizations in particular, Protect Our Water and the San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center, have been especially vocal and active in their criticism of the campus and its associated development.
The groups say the university and the planned residential and commercial development around it will damage habitats for valuable plants and species, deplete water supplies, and generate traffic that will exacerbate the region’s air-quality problems.
They also worry that the campus will be a magnet for additional development, encouraging real-estate speculation at the expense of farmland. “Everybody isn’t going to live in the ‘UCP,’” says Lydia Miller, president of the raptor center, using the university’s jargon for the residential “university community project.”
The two organizations have filed numerous lawsuits to try to block the campus, including one challenging the assertion by the University of California Board of Regents that the campus plan was in compliance with state environmental laws and another challenging the City of Merced’s decision to connect the campus to the city’s sewage-treatment plant. (They lost both.) In January they sued the Merced County Board of Supervisors over its decision to change the county’s land-use plan to accommodate the residential development.
Now, as the university gears up for the biggest regulatory hurdle, those groups stand ready to intervene again. University leaders need to satisfy federal regulators that their future development and the steps they have already taken will adequately protect wetlands before they can proceed with future phases, and the groups will be fighting to block that approval. At the very least, they say, the university should be required to be more upfront about what will be built and how it plans to manage the effects of the added traffic and water use.
“We want them to pay their way,” says Ms. Miller.
Steve Burke, a spokesman for Protect Our Water, says he finds it more than a little ironic that university leaders talk so much about their “green” campus and how its faculty members, like those working under the new Sierra Institute research center, will be studying the effect of growth on the Central Valley.
It’s “almost offensive” says Mr. Burke, a longtime resident of the region. “They are the growth impacts of the valley.”
