Campus Spaces

Welcome to the May 2019 edition of our newsletter about buildings, grounds, and more.
Go big or go home, a friend of mine likes to say, and it sure seems Dartmouth College has decided to go big: The college is planning to replace not just its central steam plant but its entire campuswide heating network. The project, which is just getting started, is an undertaking that I’m sure many other institutions will want to watch.

Also this month:

• Should your campus have an “aesthetic of sustainability”?
• Penn State will replace its art museum.
• Not everyone loves the Mattin Center as much as architecture fans do.
• Angelo State gets a chapel perfect for weddings.

Enjoy!

Make No Little Plans: Dartmouth Envisions an All-New Heating Network — for 119 Buildings

In 1898, when Dartmouth College opened its current steam plant, heating more than a dozen campus structures with high-pressure steam from central boilers was innovative. Over the decades, the plant has been expanded — it now serves 119 buildings — and upgraded so that it also generates electricity, and its fuel was switched from coal to oil. Even so, says Joshua Keniston, the college’s vice president for institutional projects, the whole system is “really quite dated.”

“We’re feeling like, How do we become innovative again?” he says. The answer sounds audacious: Start from scratch. And not just with a new system, but also with a new business model for it.

So the college is seeking a business partner — one with ideas, expertise, and capital — with which to build a new central plant fueled largely by wood chips from local timber operations. The plant would produce hot water, not steam, and a new network of pipes would deliver that hot water around the campus. In some buildings, connecting the hot-water lines to the current heat-exchanger system will be fairly easy, but in a number of older buildings, “it could mean going in and opening up walls,” says Keniston.

Much of the motivation for the project, which Dartmouth says could cost $200 million, comes from the college’s quest for environmental sustainability. Two years ago, President Philip J. Hanlon set a 2025 deadline for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in half, and also for replacing No. 6 fuel oil — the steam plant burns some 3.5 million gallons a year — with renewable fuels.

But the college is also eager to get out of the business of running its own energy company and concentrate instead on its academic mission. After studying other institutions that have created similar types of partnerships — including Ohio State University, which contracted out its parking operations and then its energy infrastructure — Dartmouth is estimating that an experienced private partner could get it 10- to 20-percent greater efficiency, Keniston says. “We see a lot of value in having a firm that runs six or 14 or 100 other plants and can bring that knowledge of day-to-day operations.”

The other big savings — “the headline,” Keniston calls it — comes from replacing the steam system with a hot-water network, which is expected to be 20-percent more efficient. “Because steam is so hot compared with the temperatures around it, there’s a lot of heat loss as you transmit it to the buildings,” he says. “There are some uses where you need the energy that’s contained in the steam. Having nice even heat in all your buildings is not one of those uses.”

In the existing system, he says, steam goes on in a building once an hour to warm it up. Then the steam cools and pipes carry the condensate back to the plant. “With hot water, if we keep it consistent, we don’t have those dips. It becomes more comfortable for building occupants.” A hot-water system can also be set up so that it’s easier to control locally. A drawback, he says, is that a hot-water system relies on pumps, so “as we think about our resiliency and redundancy, we have to make sure we have electricity to run those pumps.”

Another challenge will be locating the new plant. The current facility is hemmed in by the Hood Museum of Art, a visual-arts building, two residence halls, and an athletics complex. There’s no room to expand and add storage for wood chips. Next week the college will identify several potential sites for a new plant within a two-mile radius — farther than that, and the system would become less efficient.

But the plant isn’t expected to be the big challenge. Keniston says Dartmouth has 26,000 feet of steam pipes, most of which will need to be replaced. “That means we have to dig up all of these trenches around campus. We have to go into 119 buildings and transition them over.”

Once it’s in place, a hot-water system will offer the college more options. A dozen or so Dartmouth buildings have solar panels, but they can’t be tied into the existing steam system because it’s pressurized. Hot water isn’t. “So if we wanted to put in thermal solar, or heat pumps, or geothermal, over time we can supplement that on a building or subdistrict level,” says Keniston. “We see the conversion to hot water as something that serves us for 100 years.”

Like Middlebury’s biomass-gasification plant, the new Dartmouth biomass facility would be supplemented by equipment for burning a liquid biofuel to meet peak winter demand or serve as backup while maintenance work is done on the biomass side. “The energy market is shifting pretty quickly,” says Keniston, “and having both gives us some flexibility in selecting the most sustainable and renewable fuel sources that we can.”

Working with private companies is hardly new in higher education, even for energy-related projects, and it’s becoming increasingly common. Ohio State’s may be the best known deal, but the University of Maryland had an earlier partnership with Ohio State’s partner Engie; the University of Oklahoma has a partnership with Corix; and just recently, the University of North Alabama signed on with Schneider Electric to modernize some 70 buildings and reduce campus energy use by a fifth. But Keniston says Dartmouth’s project is “probably among the first that has all of the components in this particular arrangement.”

The college has set up a two-stage process for choosing a partner. In the first stage, Dartmouth asked interested companies to describe their qualifications and high-level ideas, which the college is now assessing. In the second phase, which Keniston expects will begin this fall, between two and four shortlisted contenders will be more closely evaluated. Clearly, there’s interest: About 150 people people attended an industry open house in March to see the college’s existing facilities and hear more about what it wants.

A top priority will be finding a partner that can provide 24/7/365 reliability. “As we look at the qualifications for partners, we will be looking for teams that maybe have worked on military bases that have really intense reliability requirements,” says Keniston. Also, Dartmouth wants to be sure it finds a partner it can work with for at least the next three decades.

Dartmouth’s other big concern has been the deal itself, he says, and the college has spent months thinking it through with members of its facilities, finance, legal, and risk teams. “As we transition away from being the owner-operator, we have to think about how we structure this in such a way that we’re going to get what we need, and we’ll be paying a fair price for it” for 30 to 35 years. For Dartmouth, he says, “it’s a really different way to operate.”

On Campus and Beyond

More than 60,000 people have signed a petition asking the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to name a new recreation center in honor of Ellis Parlier and Riley Howell, the two students killed in the recent shooting at the university. Read more.

Just months after Dartmouth removed the most visible elements of Charles Moore’s design for the Hood Museum of Art, Penn State said it’s going to replace the Palmer Museum of Art, which Moore designed with Arbonies King Vlock. But the university said the current museum building would remain as “student-focused space.” Read more.

Difficulty finding a local construction company with time for another project, rising prices for steel and aluminum, and poor initial estimates are being blamed for a 50-percent hike in the price of a new facility for soccer and track teams at the University of Illinois. Read more.

Should your campus have “an aesthetic of sustainability”? A Princeton University student says it should, and argues that Princeton could start by making its cogeneration plant an attraction for visitors. Read more.

The main library at the University of Connecticut has added so much seating in recent years that it’s now adding a new staircase to stay in compliance with local codes. Read more.

In 1969, the Student Senate Transit Service at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst began operation with three buses. Fifty years later, what’s now called UMass Transit Services carries 3.5 million riders a year. An anniversary celebration begins on June 14. Read more.

A Reader Recalls the Mattin Center — Mice, Roaches, and All

Our recent Campus Spaces special section mentioned the Johns Hopkins University plan to locate a new student center on the site occupied by an 18-year-old arts complex, the Mattin Center. It was designed by a prominent firm, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and many architecture fans love it.

Hopkins didn’t reply when we asked to talk to someone about the building, but last week a former employee who worked in the complex wrote with his recollections. Because he’s still employed in higher education, he asked not to be identified. Here’s some of what he had to say:

I understand that from the outside and upper floors of the building, it is unique and interesting. The few rooms that are above grade are all windows and are beautifully lit as a result. Unfortunately, this is maybe a third of the space in the building. The rest of the rooms are at or below ground level. They are often dark and damp. We saw mice and cockroaches on a weekly basis.

The entire building is poorly constructed. For years, architecture firms would tour the building as an example of what to not allow contractors to do in construction. It was poorly ventilated — freezing in the winter, incredibly hot in the summer. Those upstairs rooms that were so nice in the spring and fall swung wildly in temperature in the cold winter and hot summer. Cracks in the foundation, outside staircases, and floors were so commonplace that large areas of the building were often cordoned off.

When the university found the need for offices and student meeting space to outweigh the need for darkrooms, it found renovating the building was impossible. The inner walls were made of concrete, making it impossibly expensive to move rooms or install new doors. Much of the limited interior is taken up by large foyers that are dead space. To make do, students would often practice debate and rehearse performances on staircases.

Additionally, the building is incredibly confusing to navigate. There are at least 10 exterior doors. Many of the doors chosen by the architect are also so heavy that they could not be motorized to be ADA-compliant. To this day, I do not think that someone in a wheelchair could easily go to the bathroom in this building.

So over all, I and most people who were subjected to working in the Mattin Center considered it an abysmal failure and an example of architects placing form over function. There may have been a brief time that the building met the needs of its inhabitants, but due to its inflexibility and poor design, we quickly outgrew it.

New Buildings and Recent Renovations

This year, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts finished renovating the lower levels of a 1920s auto-assembly building in downtown Philly. The project, by DLR Group and Westlake Reed Leskosky, added a 256-seat auditorium, and more. Read more.

Arizona State University is building a Health Futures Center adjacent to a Mayo Clinic campus in Northeast Phoenix. The 145,200-square-foot, $80-million facility will support interdisciplinary research and medical simulation. CO Architects and DFDG designed the project. Read more.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has started work on a $125-million interdisciplinary-research center, a joint project of the Colleges of Liberal Arts; Science and Mathematics; and Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. ZGF Architects did the design. Read more.

A new chapel is under construction at Angelo State University. The 3,100-square-foot building will include, besides a narthex and a sanctuary, a bride’s room and a groom’s room. KFW Architects did the design. Read more.

Quotable

“Make no little plans” is, of course, the beginning of an oft-quoted passage from a speech by Daniel Burnham, the great Chicago architect. In March, the blog Mysterious Chicago reported that the passage, long suspected of being apocryphal, in fact is not. Read more. (“Go big or go home,” though, can be definitively attributed to my friend Brad.)