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Campus Spaces: Flexibility for the Future

The U. of California at Merced’s Science and Engineering Building II was designed by SmithGroupJJR.
The U. of California at Merced’s Science and Engineering Building II was designed by SmithGroupJJR.

At any given moment, most colleges are planning, building, renovating, or maintaining an infrastructure project. This special report examines how colleges’ buildings and grounds help them do their jobs better (or, in some cases, hinder them). A well-designed space matters: It can encourage more interaction between students and faculty members, and it can help a rapidly expanding university serve a growing student body without having to choose between function and aesthetics.

Our Campus Spaces report also raises some practical questions: Do faculty members really need private offices? Can “P3s” — public-private partnerships — help colleges build more efficiently? Is modular construction an option? (It worked for Harvard.)

The late Zaha Hadid once said that architecture “should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.” We were inspired by many of the stories we heard about colleges and their spaces, and we hope our readers will be, too.

Chronicle subscribers and site-license holders have complimentary access to Campus Spaces. To purchase the report separately, please visit our online store.

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Administrators say it’s the “third rail” of facilities questions: With faculty members spending less of their time in their campus offices, can colleges afford to keep building them?
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The traditional faculty office, tucked away in a different building, doesn’t lend itself to casual conversation after class. But there are spaces that do.
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Colleges build for the ages, usually with heavy stone structures that sit in place for decades. A different kind of construction can save time and money.
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Public-private partnerships can help colleges remake their campuses in years, rather than decades. The bigger the deal, the more complexities it brings.
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More than 70 institutions now offer scholarships for eSports, and they’re developing new facilities for their competitors and fans.
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The Chronicle collected images from institutions across the country that use the landscape, loosely defined, to foster learning.
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“One of the challenges at this university is that it’s so historic — the ADA wasn’t around in 1819,” says Cory Paradis, who uses a wheelchair and majors in urban planning at the University of Virginia.
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Cory Paradis gave The Chronicle a campus tour to highlight changes that have helped him navigate the University of Virginia’s campus.
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Higher education helped build Kevin Runner’s fortune, he says, and now he plans to give back — by resurrecting the campus of a defunct Kentucky college as a training ground for a sustainable future.
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By Karen A. Snedker, Jennifer McKinney
For three months, Seattle Pacific University welcomed people who are homeless to the campus. Here’s what professors and students learned.
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By Fawn Behrens-Smith
With proper evaluation and planning, new space doesn’t have to mean new square footage.
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By Warren Williams
Spaces where people can connect with one another are especially valuable at community-focused HBCUs.