Campus Spaces

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Welcome to the July 2019 edition of our newsletter about buildings, grounds, and more.

How much time do you spend thinking about the future of campus energy systems? Don Guckert, the U. of Iowa’s facilities director, offers some surprising and hopeful predictions below — including that developments in materials science may play a big role.

Also this month:

• New labs should be flexible — because the future is unpredictable.
• A Red Square (not the one in Moscow) proves to be a Modernist treat.
• All those devices students bring? They’re eating your bandwidth alive.

Enjoy!

One afternoon last week, the U. of Iowa’s Art Building West, a 2006 Steven Holl structure built next to and over an old quarry, was using $12.88 worth of electricity per hour and $35.79 worth of chilled water (but no steam), for a total utility cost of $48.67 an hour. The Hancher Auditorium, meanwhile, was running at $94.45 an hour, the Campus Recreation and Wellness Center at $179.64 an hour, and the Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories at $221.14.

All this was easy to see because facilities served by the university’s utility network — buildings totaling some 18 million square feet — automatically report power, steam, and chilled water use to a campus energy dashboard. “We’re heavily into technology and understanding what the demand is on campus,” says Don Guckert, associate vice president and director of facilities management. “The most recent biomedical-research building we put in place has 23,000 points of data collection.”

What data on that scale make possible, he says, is “predicting tomorrow’s campus demand so we can make decisions on when we buy power, when we produce power, what systems we turn on or off.” The university produces steam for heat but also uses it to generate electricity before sending it out around the campus; it will end its use of coal by 2025 and will instead burn both natural gas and biomass (oat hulls from a Quaker Oats plant, wood chips from a furniture factory, and Miscanthus grass that the university grows on land unsuitable for other crops). But as much as anything, he says, it’s the university’s decade-old energy-control center that has “optimized our economics relating to energy.”

Guckert is also president of APPA (formerly the Association of Physical Plant Administrators). He says the biggest development in facilities on American campuses is that sensor capabilities are improving, and mechanical systems are increasingly interconnected, allowing artificial and augmented intelligence to help facilities staff members operate buildings and entire campuses much more efficiently.

Not only do lights in rooms turn themselves on and off automatically, but heating and cooling systems respond to room conditions in real time. The same technology can also help keep campus machinery operating at peak efficiency, Guckert says. Until recently, a university could fine-tune an older building’s heating, air-conditioning, and ventilation equipment (the process is called “recommissioning”), but after a few years the energy savings would diminish. “The equipment starts aging, filters get clogged, our maintenance staff starts fussing with dampers, that sort of thing,” he says. “The technology that’s now being put into place will hold all that equipment at an optimized level. When energy performance starts to degrade, we know it almost immediately.”

“As a profession, this is our future,” says Guckert. “It’s coming at us real quick.”

Advances in materials science will bring even more improvements in the next decade, he predicts. “We’re starting to build intelligence into our building products. In the future, solar panels will look like windows, and the heat that our buildings’ shells absorb will be converted to energy.” Materials science, nanotechnology, improving sensor capabilities, and the ever-growing number of devices large and small that are connected to the internet are converging for a “dramatically different” future, he says.

And it isn’t just the future of higher education, he adds. “The smart campus could be the precursor to the smart city.” The diversity of systems on campuses — for energy and building maintenance, for space utilization, for pedestrians, cyclists, parking, and more — replicates what happens in any city. So colleges are in a great position to test what will eventually be commonplace in cities, Guckert says.

(You can read more about the similarities between campuses and cities in my colleague Scott Carlson’s just-published Chronicle report, “The Campus as City.”)

Greetings from Seattle!

This year’s annual meeting of the SCUP wraps up on Wednesday at Seattle’s convention center, the older part of which is a festival of 1980s architecture suspended over Interstate 5. Among the highlights:

• Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern U., offered a keynote speech about how colleges should prepare for the age of artificial intelligence. But he also said that Northeastern — based in Boston but with campuses here in Seattle and in Charlotte, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Toronto — tells architects it works with that there’s no way of knowing whether a lab built today will still be used the same way in 15, 30, or 50 years. The university wants new lab space to be designed so that it can easily be repurposed as needed — a wet lab could become a dry lab, a computing lab could become a wet lab. Do the planning right, Aoun said, and “the cost is minimal.”
• Should your facilities planning be more focused on student and employee wellness? A presentation by several U. of Wisconsin at Madison staff members and a landscape architect made an interesting point: A typical campus wellness program affects only those who can be persuaded to participate, but wellness-oriented improvements in the campus environment can reach many, many more people. “I would encourage you to find your health-promotion folks on your campus” and engage them in facilities and landscape projects, said Aaron Williams, a landscape architect and assistant campus planner at the university.
• As it has grown from 7,300 undergraduates to 11,360, the U. of Massachusetts at Lowell has conducted an “unintentional” experiment comparing several types of student housing. One is an all-suites project built the traditional way — the university hired an architect and borrowed the money — but another was a partnership with a developer, and two others were purchases of existing structures (a hotel and a loft-apartment complex built in an old mill). What were the experiment’s results? According to Adam Baacke, director of campus planning and development, the traditional approach doesn’t seem sexy nowadays, when public-private partnerships are all the rage, “but it’s the best way to get what you want, if you can afford it.” If you can’t, working with a developer will cost you some degree of control. Also, location is still as important as anything else — maybe more important. Even a healthy discount doesn’t draw students to housing that’s far from the center of campus and from their friends.

I took advantage of the light-rail system to visit the U. of Washington campus, which was about 15 years old when it was chosen as the site of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The exposition was laid out by the Olmsted Brothers so that its main axis frames Mount Rainier, and that alignment survives in the campus plan today. Even more impressive than the giant central fountain or the Collegiate Gothic 1920s Suzzallo Library, however, is the giant plaza known as Red Square. It’s a glorious Modernist treat.

On Campuses and Beyond

A Student Success District: “The intent of creating this district is to improve student success through direct connections between student services, academic support, and amenities in the heart of campus.” That’s how the U. of Arizona describes a $57-million undertaking (above) to link libraries, a gym, and a student-success building. Read more.

Someone at a Dartmouth College construction site wasn’t having a good month: “The northern soil retention structure at the Thayer/Computer Science building site has been placed 10 feet south of the intended location.” Read more.

“Mobility surges, bandwidth explodes”: An annual report by the Association of College and University Housing Officers - International finds that “devices are more bandwidth greedy than ever before.” (Above.) Read more.

“Sustainability ambassadors” at the U. of Alabama at Birmingham are helping colleagues in their buildings reduce their use of energy, water, and hazardous chemicals — and their output of trash. Read more.

“The lanes, completed June 4, were used by cyclists immediately.” Iowa City’s 2017 bicycle master plan recommends 72 miles of bike lanes in streets and 28 miles of trails. The bike lanes help keep riders — including many U. of Iowa students — off the sidewalks, where they can be ticketed. Read more.

Marygrove College, in Detroit, has announced that it will close in December, but it’s unclear what will become of its campus, “which is filled with gorgeous Tudor Gothic buildings.” Read more.

Blair Kamin, architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, asks whether a new medical-research building at Northwestern U. is a world-class structure, and reviews the project’s history: “Adding a dose of absurdity to the broth, the city’s ever-pliant landmarks commission in 2012 found old Prentice worthy of preliminary designation — and rescinded the decision at the same meeting based on an economic impact report. In 2013 the wrecking crews moved in.” Read more.

New Buildings and Recent Renovations

An 18-acre, 3,700-bed student-housing project is in the works at the U. of South Carolina. Seven buildings are to be built in phases for a total of $460 million. Read more.

A 10,000-square-foot multicultural center is being planned at Ball State U. Designed by RG Collaborative of Indianapolis, the building will have a big multipurpose room, a café, offices, a lounge, a library, and exhibit space. It will be located near the library. Read more.