When Lawrence's campus center is completed, it will be
The house that
everyone built
By Gordon Brown
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2006
This is a story about a building that does not yet exist, except in the
imaginations of a whole lot of people — the people who, collectively, are Lawrence
University. It also is the story of the people — trustees, faculty, staff,
and especially students — who have been working to plan the best possible
campus center for Lawrence.
What is a campus center? And why does Lawrence need one?
Imagine that the dining room in your home seats 360 people and every day 800
show up for lunch and 650 of them come back for dinner. Sympathize then with
Patrick
Niles, director of dining services, who sees numbers like that, day after day,
coming through Jason Downer Commons, Lawrence’s main dining
hall since 1968.
President Jill Beck describes, with a slight shudder, the sight of students
standing in line, balancing their trays of food that is getting progressively
colder,
waiting for a chair — a situation she characterizes as “simply
unacceptable.”
Therefore, the first thing a campus center needs to have is a modern, capacious,
attractive dining facility, one in which both spaces and services are designed
to meet students’ needs, preferences, and schedules. But that’s
just the first thing.
Life outside the classroom
Dean of Students Nancy Truesdell quotes from a recent Chronicle of Higher
Education essay by an architectural historian:
Universities require communal spaces that encourage people to spend time together. Otherwise, academic life devolves into disparate, meaningless episodes — a lecture, a walk from class to class, a retreat into dorm or car. Public spaces encourage faculty and staff members and students to fully participate in the university.…[An] effective way to connect faculty members and students would be to make the physical environment more conducive to informal gathering. Loitering should be encouraged. Lingering should be a positive value.
Truesdell notes that Lawrence, quite intentionally, concentrated for a number
of years on creating new academic buildings, from Wriston Art Center and Shattuck
Hall of Music to Briggs Hall, Science Hall, and total
renovation of Youngchild Hall. With those goals accomplished, however, it is
time to focus creatively on “the rest of students’ lives, the part
outside the classroom,” she says.
In 1998, the Board of Trustees established a Task
Force on Residential Life comprised
of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees, which conducted an extensive
two-year study of all aspects of campus life. Their work included surveys of
students, faculty, and staff members; listening sessions with alumni; and visits
to other
campuses to view residential, dining, and campus center facilities.
In 2000, the Task Force made its report to the Board, highlighted by these five
recommendations:
• Affirm the centrality of the residential nature of the institution.
• Provide a high-quality food service that is responsive to student needs.
• Enhance on-campus housing conditions and residential facilities.
• Expand the opportunity for students to experience the benefits of group
living.
• Plan and construct a new campus center to include central dining facilities
and
to serve as the centerpiece for campus life.
Implementation of these recommendations, adopted by the Board, resulted over
successive years in the construction of Hiett
Hall, housing some 183 upperclass
students in two- and four-person suites, and the adoption of a new procedure
for allotting what has become known as Formal
Group Housing for groups that share
a common mission or purpose who are seeking to occupy one of Lawrence’s
small-house residences.
Which brings us to the Task Force’s recommendations on food service and
creating a campus center.
Very good listeners
In 2004, Lawrence enlisted the Milwaukee firm Uihlein-Wilson
Architects to launch
a design process. They, in turn, brought in KSS, an architectural design firm
from Princeton, New Jersey, to work with them and the campus in designing a building
to meet the diverse needs being articulated by the Lawrence community. They completed
that assignment and presented the final design to the Board of Trustees in May
2006
.
”From the beginning,” says Del Wilson of Uihlein-Wilson, “we
promised
the campus we would be very good listeners.” In return, the campus — students,
faculty, and staff — proved to be very good responders, offering reactions,
comments, and suggestions at each stage of the planning process and assisting
in a very real way in the design of each part of the building.
In the fall of 2005, a Campus
Center Planning Committee, chaired by Dean Truesdell,
was formed to engage the wider campus community in helping to shape the design
of the center, with particular focus on the programmatic use of space, the
building’s
finishes and furnishings, its external design, and its environmental impact.
After holding campus-wide briefings, one for students and one for faculty and
staff, the committee created focus groups to address specific spaces, large and
small, in the campus center.
A total of 13 focus groups met to consider questions such as what would be
sold in the convenience store — answer: the sundries and hygiene items that
now require students without cars to make a long trudge in Wisconsin winters
to a Walgreen’s at the far other end of downtown Appleton. (The convenience
store, by the way, is not to be confused with the campus center’s “logo
store,” which would sell Lawrence-branded apparel and merchandise.)
Other focus groups zeroed in on particular parts of the building — dining
service facilities large and small; performance spaces; a central mail room;
student activities, publications, and government offices; a cinema, especially
in relation to faculty efforts to create a film studies program; and others,
including a discussion of the role art works could play in and around the building.
What it will mean to students
Nathan Litt, ’08, was a student member of the Campus Center Planning
Committee. Looking back at the planning process and ahead to the proposed building,
he says:
“The campus center is very important to the Lawrence community because
it addresses key issues regarding residence life, such as better dining facilities
and a central
location where student groups/organizations can meet and interact, and it will
serve as a place where students can go and always be welcome. The new building
will greatly improve student life at Lawrence, thanks to venues like the campus
store and the cinema that we currently do not have.”
Steve Syverson, dean of admissions and financial aid, also affirms the critical
need for a new campus center from the perspective of recruitment of students.
“Although we don’t believe that students make their ultimate choice
of where
to apply or enroll based solely on physical facilities — still, it is
a significant factor as part of their holistic assessment of the campuses.
“With the exception of Hiett Hall,” Syverson says, “most of
our focus in the past two decades has been on academic facilities, and it seems
to have
paid off — in surveys of our admitted students (both those who enroll and
those who don’t), our academic facilities and overall campus attractiveness
receive much higher ratings than our residence halls or recreational facilities.
Those perceptions influence the decisions of prospective students.
“The dramatic look of the new campus center — and the vibrant activity
that
will be found inside — will have significant impact on our attractiveness
to students. Their first criteria clearly are the academic programs, but we
are in competition with lots of colleges that have great academic programs,
so the secondary criteria take on major significance.
“We are a residential campus,” Syverson adds, “so the students
live here 24 hours per day, seven days per week, and most of that time is not
spent inside academic buildings. Students are seeking a high ‘quality of
life’ and thus the dining facilities and residential facilities are critical
to their happiness,
as are the places for both formal and informal social life.”
Next to the river and in the woods
Now, engage your imagination and move forward in time for a tour of the campus
center-to-be, as currently envisioned.
Sited west of Sage Hall and east of Lawe Street on the south side of John Street,
current plans call for a building of 100,000 square feet.
Standing
on the east side of Memorial Union, looking across Lawe Street, we see that
the venerable steel-and-concrete foot bridge will be replaced by something
quite spectacular, a “land bridge” (pictured, right) over Lawe
Street, a carefully landscaped, wide, and inviting walkway with grass, plantings,
and
outdoor sculpture,
that will extend the natural setting of the campus center to connect with the
academic campus.
From here, we get our first look at how the campus center is designed to fit
into its surroundings. Nestled into the hillside along the Fox River, each
of its four levels (five, actually, counting a mechanical and storage level
at the
very bottom) will feature large amounts of glass, with the accompanying magnificent
river views. The architects specify that the building, as planned, will not
have a “front side” and a “back side” but, rather, a “street
side” and a “river side.”
Crossing the land bridge and approaching the campus center’s John Street
façade, we pass the outdoor dining area of its café and notice
that the new building will be scaled to live in harmony with its neighbor,
Sage Hall. A courtyard on the east side of the campus center will connect it
visually
and functionally to Sage.
Entering
the building, we find ourselves on The Street (pictured, right), a wide, sunny
hallway that passes through the main floor, linking its elements, which include
the
café,
logo store, and information desk. As you walk down The Street, you will be
looking directly at the fireplace in the Great Room, a
“living room” where students can gather, study, chat, and enjoy a
relaxed atmosphere. Connected to the Great Room and extending across the south
side of this level will be the Great View Room, normally set up as
a casual lounge like its neighbor but capable of hosting events of up to 500
people. Both Great Rooms will be two-story spaces with vast expanses of glass
and striking river views.
As we move down The Street and look upward and to the left, we can see into the
level above, which will be devoted to student activities and contains work areas,
storage, and meeting rooms for campus organizations, as well as the offices of
the associate dean of students for activities and his staff.
One
level down from the main floor, on Lower Level I, will be the cinema, mail
room, convenience store, and campus program space (pictured, right). Lower
Level II, below that, will be the dining area, with
servery, dining rooms, and kitchens.
Parenthetically, another example of student input into campus-center planning
is that the first plans for the building called for the dining facilities to
be on Lower Level I, on the theory that students wouldn’t
want to have to go all the way down to Lower Level II to eat. Wrong, said the
students who were consulted, noting that, after the dining room closed in the
early evening, they would have to pass through a darkened dining level to get
to the programming opportunities below. And so the floors were switched.
Job #1
Among Lawrence’s liberal arts college peers, Amherst, Carleton, Davidson,
Grinnell, Illinois Wesleyan, Macalester, Middlebury, Pomona, and St. Olaf have
all recently built new campus centers or
undertaken major renovations and improvements to their dining facilities. This
is mentioned, not in any sense of “College X has one, so we have to have
one, too” — which some people call an “amenities race” between
institutions — but as a sign that Lawrence is not alone in recognizing
and remedying deficiencies in the infrastructure of daily campus life.
Greg Volk, executive vice-president, looking into the future, says, “The
Board of Trustees has confirmed that the campus center is the number-one capital
priority for the college, and a number of trustees have already made generous
commitments toward
this project.
“But, while the need for the campus center is pressing,” he adds, “it
will nevertheless be necessary to secure all the funding for it through gifts
and commitments prior to authorizing the project to move forward.”
Lawrence’s campus center is seeking to be certified under the LEED (Leadership
in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System®. For
information on what that means, please go to www.lawrence.edu/taskforce/campuscenter/leed/