The Ivory Tower Turns Green
By Alec Appelbaum
These days, innovations in university design make buildings kinder to the environment, brighter for the people who use them, and friendlier to the communities beyond the campus. When colleges tried to steer young men in the footsteps of the ancients, they chose closed off quads. Now, they challenge young men and women to share a fragile planet. Plenty took a look at a few college campuses that are earning top grades in green design.
Images provided by Pelli Clarke Pelli
SAVING LIGHT: Pioneering architects have always brought their A-game to university commissions, and green architects are no exception. Cesar and Rafael Pelli, two designers from the international architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli, are collaborating on a new classroom building for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Business. Planners expect it to conserve forty to fifty percent of a typical facility’s energy with plenty of natural light and motion sensors when it opens in 2008. And the business school’s number-crunchers are sure to appreciate the savings on air-conditioning and heat.
Images provided by Randy Croxton of Croxton Collaborative Architects
BUILDINGS THAT BRIGHTEN: And why shouldn’t students get a look at the brighter side of advanced design? Randy Croxton of Croxton Collaborative Architects describes the firm’s new science center at St. Lawrence University in northern New York State as a slap in the face to obsolete ideas about building labs cheaply with heavy steel floorplates and underground workspace. This building, he explains “is 100 percent daylit and open to the south, with raised glass walkways that don’t close off the interior.” So engineers will harness the benefits of sunlight and lower heating bills. They may also bury the cliché about the relationship between scientific skill and pasty complexion.
Image provided by Banard College
DEEP GREEN IN THE IVIES: The stately series of classical buildings between two Manhattan parks that defines Columbia University will soon get an addition that looks like a bolt of lightning—and makes use of natural light to boot. Local architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi is developing a new Barnard College arts hub, the Nexus, which will include a green roof over a 90,000-square-foot structure. The building uses a clear glass exterior to let in sunlight, making it a bright spot on campus. The architects describe its common spaces as “slipped atria,” which means that each floor has an open space ascending in a ladder shape. That open space will provide more efficient transfer of heat than the old sandstone buildings. (It’ll also look less fussy from the busy sidewalks of Manhattan.) And the green roof creates a new hangout while providing effective insulation.
Image provided by Princeton
Following the ivy road to the ‘burbs, you can find green planning underway at Yale, where Hopkins Architects, one of the British firms that established efficiency as a design priority in the 1970s, is designing a new Forestry and Environmental Studies building set to open in 2008. According to the plans, the building will harvest energy from garbage and offset all its carbon emissions. And at Princeton, Hopkins is creating a master blueprint for a chemistry building and its surrounding "natural sciences neighborhood." But think trees, not clones. The plan places the building onto a small lot to maximize room for trees and calls for sinks that use rainwater runoff. According to a university press release, this puts the chemists—who gobble more electricity than the philosophers or historians—in the university’s most efficient building.
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