Sustainability remains a ubiquitous catchword on college and university campuses across the country. As institutions spend time and energy trying to meet design and construction standards dictated by sustainability goals, however, they risk losing sight of larger issues involving campus character and cultural heritage—particularly with regard to the landscape.
This poses a serious problem, for there are few American landscape types that can rival the academic campus in depth of tradition and history. While there is no singular vision, the image most closely associated with the campus landscape is that of lush open lawns framed by appropriately scaled buildings and mature canopy trees. Such imagery has long shaped campus planning and design in this country, and continues to evoke memories and instill passions for these special places. However, since we no longer have the luxury of seemingly unlimited resources of land, water, and energy around which to plan our campuses, the viability of such a landscape model is being brought into question. As campus design is increasingly viewed through the lens of sustainability, institutions are rightfully doing their part and responding to the need for more effective and visible displays of environmental stewardship. But at what price?
Calls for more sustainable campus landscapes have not, to this point, included rallying cries promoting the removal of historic or sacred campus lawns, no matter how unsustainable they may be. These are places that have deep and committed support for their preservation, notably from the Getty Foundation, whose Campus Heritage Grants program awarded 86 grants totaling more than $13.5-million to higher-education institutions between 2002 and 2007. But such programs have been dwarfed by the emergence of the green-building movement: As the demand for more energy-efficient buildings grew exponentially, the U.S. Green Building Council stepped in with its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system at the turn of the century to fill a void in the relatively new field. Cleverly marketed, LEED was quickly adopted as the accepted litmus test for excellence, promising a quantifiable measurement system that would provide an objective rating on the relative sustainability of a project. This system fed the need to “keep up with the Joneses,” stirring the competitive juices of peer institutions across the country. By the middle of this decade, bragging rights accompanied every new LEED-certified project, an ante soon raised by the promise of buildings with silver, gold, and even platinum certification, the current holy grail of campus architecture.
As of the spring of 2010, there were 3,813 higher-education projects in the process of LEED certification.
This paints a rosy picture, and there has been undeniable success within the LEED system in relation to campus architecture. But it is important to recognize that the system has significant shortcomings. For instance, although it has been proven many times that LEED-certified buildings can be beautiful and contextually appropriate, similar success often fails to translate equally onto the landscape. I say this not as an indictment against those doing the design work, but rather as criticism of how LEED has promoted the design of buildings and their sites as stand-alone, self-contained entities, often ignoring the importance of the larger campus context and the value of precedent and consistency in character. Such compartmentalization reflects a way of thinking befitting a developer far more than that of a campus planner or designer, who typically plans buildings as integral pieces of a comprehensive system, not as islands. Campuses by definition are collections of buildings situated within a unifying landscape, and by failing to recognize the inherent sustainability of this model, institutions miss the big picture.
In fairness, the green-building council is working to remedy such shortcomings by developing LEED programs specific to neighborhoods and campuses. A separate project, the forthcoming Sustainable Sites Initiative, developed by the American Society of Landscape Architects (a group I am involved with) and other groups, will more holistically evaluate site and landscape conditions.
But there is no telling how long it will take for such efforts to make sizable inroads into the LEED-dominated system, or whether they will, in fact, change the rules in relation to campus landscape design. Each of these additions is welcome and inspires hope but still seems to reflect a fundamentally one-size-fits-all point-based system that may not properly represent the importance of cultural landscape heritage on the campus.
There is also no way to predict how the LEED system will ultimately change the look of our landscapes, but an emerging new campus-design vocabulary is influencing the issue. Where conversations were once dominated by discussion of open lawns, they now contain references to landscape elements such as rain gardens and native meadows that promote storm-water management and may garner coveted LEED points for a project seeking certification.
Although they may support environmental and pedagogical goals, such features are still foreign elements on many traditional campuses and need to be evaluated as such. Promoted as attractive, low-maintenance alternatives to lawn, they can require intensive upkeep and demand a level of horticultural expertise beyond what is available or affordable to most college and university grounds-maintenance staffs.
This RAISES the question: Just how sustainable is a landscape that cannot be maintained in an efficient manner? I am by no means against such landscapes being used appropriately on campuses, as they promote a proper use of our natural resources and display a commitment to environmental responsibility. But they should support larger-scale initiatives and adapt effectively to their context, rather than exist as anomalies related to a specific building project.
We are so entrenched in the LEED system that even though it has provided the momentum needed to push us down the road toward environmental responsibility, it has become a convenient crutch that may keep us from striving to do more. We have been programmed to believe that once the LEED-certification plaque is hanging on the wall, the task at hand is complete. We need to somehow lose this mind-set and realize that an energy-efficient building or landscape is only a small part of a very complicated equation.
Creating a truly sustainable campus is a huge undertaking, one that will require a comprehensive, encompassing vision, and will not be achieved for many years, if ever. More and more colleges and universities are accepting this challenge and making great strides in establishing sustainability programs and setting realistic target dates for cutting energy use and carbon emissions. However, we have yet to see the same widespread energy being spent on figuring out what sustainability in the campus landscape means from a cultural and aesthetic perspective.
This is something all institutions need to be doing, and it should not be left to consultants or an objective and generic third-party rating system to figure this out for us. This is a subjective decision involving the heritage and character of individual campuses, and it needs to be made by the stewards of these campuses—from the planning, design, and maintenance staffs all the way up to the senior administrators and the boards of trustees. This issue—and these landscapes—are that important.
