Summer/Fall 1997

A Campus Plan

Whether we carefully and thoughtfully shape our spaces or build them in and ad hoc way, we know that they will shape us powerfully for many years to come. Far too often, college and university leaders underestimated the facilitating impact of spaces properly designed to nurture and support the teaching and learning so central to our being, and they in turn underestimate the extent that inadequate facilities are a barrier to success.
It follows that, when you have a chance to shape new and existing space for the current and next generations of students and faculty – as we do now at St. Lawrence – you had better take the time to get it right. If you do a bad job of mowing the lawn, you get to fix it the following week. When you build or renovate a major space on a university campus, you live with your choices for a long time.
We had just completed a year of facilities and technology planning in a process that involved faculty, staff, students and trustees working with principals in the firm of Dober, Lidsky, Craig and Associates. We identified our facilities and technology needs and wants, proposed and discussed alternative solutions, obtained rough estimates of costs, and began to devise a combined long-term operating and capital financial plant to determine how many of our needs and wants we might reasonably be able to meet in the coming decade.
All of this was done thinking of the St. Lawrence campus as an interrelated set of buildings and outdoor spaces meant to be program and aesthetic resources in support of a learning community. All projects, in other words, should be conceived not just as solutions in themselves, but also as contributions to an evolving and increasingly pleasing and functional campus. We benefit today in key parts of our campus from some wonderful indoor and outdoor spaces conceived and executed by our predecessors; we have an obligation, on our watch, to make things even better.
American college and university campuses are distinctive creations. In his Campus: An American Planning Tradition, Paul Venable Turner writes: “While designing the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson described his goal as the creation of an ‘academical village.’ This term expressed Jefferson’s own vies on education and planning, but it also summarizes a basic trait of American higher education from the colonial period to the twentieth century: the conception of colleges and universities as communities in themselves – in effect, as cities in microcosm.”
Like medieval English universities, American colleges and universities bring students and faculty to live and study together in one place requiring, therefore, not just academic spaces, but also residence halls, dining facilities. But Americans departed from English tradition by creating individual colleges in separate locations rather than clustering them at a university, and thus they intensified the autonomous nature of each college as a community in itself. They strengthened it further by another innovation, the placing of college in the countryside or even in the wilderness, an unprecedented break with European tradition. The romantic notion of a college in nature, removed from the corruption forces of the city, became an American ideal. But in the process the college had to become even more fully a kind of miniature city. “Another trait that typifies American college planning,” Turner writes, “is its spaciousness and openness to the world…”
In all of these ways the St. Lawrence campus is quintessentially American, a treasure that we must protect and enhance.

KEY ELEMENTS of our proposed plan are as follows:

• Locate a new University Campus Center as a renovation of Piskor Hall and expand out toward the present bookstore; demolish the present Bookstore and relocate it to Brewer Field house; renovate Dana Dining Hall with a new entrance facing toward the new Campus Center. These changes combined will create a definitive visual arrival center for the campus. Eben Holden should be renovated to accommodate large campus special events.
• Add design features to the Park Street arrival route to strengthen it as an arrival point; strengthen it as an arrival point; strengthen the corner of Park and University Avenue as the main campus entrance.
• Renovate Augsbury/Leithead, including expansion of the fitness center; add an athletic playing field and outdoor track facility to the south of Leithead; reconfigure Weeks Field into intramural and recreational fields.
• Expand and renovate science facilities, and connect the sciences with the remainder for the campus by duplicating the “historic landscape” atmosphere in the quad to the north of the science buildings and to the east of the new Campus Center.
• Renovate and expand Griffiths Arts Center to meet the expanding and changing needs of fine arts, music and speech and theatre. Noble Center would then be renovated to provide a home to the current occupants of Piskor Hall (history, sociology and anthropology) and possibly other humanities departments or programs.
• Owen D. Young Library should be renovated to adapt to today’s technology and to accommodate the next 20 years of materials storage.
• Romoda Drive would end at the Quad (in front of the Nobel Center). This termination should be enhanced to signify an important entrance arrival point for the campus. Romoda Drive would not continue in front of Vilas but would be rerouted behind Vilas, through the Beta parking lot, and there link up with University Avenue. New trees, other landscaping elements and crisscrossing walkways should be added to the Quad.
• A program of renovation of student residential spaces should be planned, guided by reconsidered and then widely affirmed philosophy of residential life.
• Teaching spaces should be updated and renovated on an annual basis. As part of this process, more campus classrooms should be outfitted with state-of-the-art technology and designed to fit better the ways faculty teach and students learn.
• A significant stream of capital should be made available annually to upgrade campus computing technology and to replace and/or add to infrastructure.
• A significant and appropriate stream of capital should be made available annually to improve the campus landscape.

If we were to attempt to meet all of our wants and needs over the course of a decade, the annual cost would be roughly $9 million. Some $10 million is already on hand, in cash; another significant chunk will come from Campaign St. Lawrence (about which we will say more in a few months); and some will come from our annual allocation from the operating budget to capital projects and possibly from future borrowing. While we will move ahead with several key projects immediately – library renovation, renovation of Dana Dining Hall, movement of the Bookstore to Brewer, and further recreation and athletic facility planning, with an eye to beginning our first project in that area next summer – much of this coming year will be devoted to financial planning and priority-setting – including deciding the relative importance to us of investments in plant versus other alternatives – necessary to move to an overall implantation plan.
These are exciting times at St. Lawrence. We fell our obligations to preserve and extend the best work of our predecessors greatly; we understand, I think, how important it is to plan carefully, inclusively and with vision; and we know how much properly designed indoor and outdoor spaces can facilitate teaching and learning. The cost will be high, but the educational payoff for our students will be substantial and long-lasting. It’s good to be here just now!