Higher Education

Orange Coast College broke ground on the $36 million Kinesiology and Athletics Complex in May of 2019 in Costa Mesa, Calif. Designed by Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, the three-building, 88,000-sf project will house division offices, athletic training and adaptive physical education rooms, student support spaces, locker rooms, a 65-meter competition pool, a 25-meter instructional pool, and a covered 450-person bleacher. General contractor C.W.

Georgia Tech opened the $375 million Coda building in May of 2019. Located at Technology Square in Atlanta, the 755,000-sf innovation hub provides interdisciplinary research space for Georgia Tech's data analytics and computational science programs, as well as offering leasable offices and labs for industry partners. The 21-story tower features a central piazza with a spiral staircase leading to the Collaboration Core, a series of six three-story vertical atriums that join the wings of the building.

Virginia Tech began construction in April of 2019 on the $105 million Living Learning Community in Blacksburg, Va. Part of the planned Creativity + Innovation District, the mixed-use residential complex will provide multipurpose teaching and learning spaces on the ground floor, including teaching studios, seminar rooms, a performance hall, practice rooms, maker spaces, and shops for working with wood, metal, and paint. The upper stories of the three-wing complex will offer 596 student beds and apartments for faculty and visiting academics.

Franklin College dedicated its new Science Center in May of 2019 in Franklin, Ind. Designed by BSA LifeStructures, the $17 million renovation and expansion project transformed the existing 30,000-sf science building into a two-story, 51,000-sf facility featuring flexible learning spaces that combine laboratory and lecture functions.

The University of Notre Dame’s Campus Crossroads project, compleletd in 2017, transforms the iconic Notre Dame football stadium into a vibrant multi-use campus hub and student center with near constant activity. As the largest, most ambitious construction project in the university’s 175-year history, the stadium remodel includes the addition of three new adjacent buildings that provide more than 800,000-sf of academic, athletic, and student life space designed to increase interaction and wellbeing.

Midwestern State University is building the $40 million Centennial Hall in Wichita Falls, Texas. Housing the Gunn College of Health Sciences and Human Services, the four-story, 87,000-sf building will feature an 80-person round classroom, a learning stair, a collaborative student lounge, and a full-height atrium. The center will provide simulation training suites, classrooms, and teaching labs for programs in nursing, dental hygiene, radiologic sciences, respiratory care, and social work.

The University of Strathclyde is building the £60 million Learning & Teaching Building in Glasgow in the United Kingdom. Designed by BDP to support innovative pedagogies, the flexible academic hub will provide 150-person collaborative classrooms, a learning village for individual study, student-facing support services, and space for the University of Strathclyde Students’ Association. The 215,000-sf project will incorporate two existing buildings and is slated for occupancy in fall of 2020.

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) celebrated the opening of the Cobb County Research Facility South in May of 2019. Located in Smyrna on land purchased from Lockheed Martin, the 350,000-sf campus houses the Aerospace, Transportation, and Advanced Systems Laboratory (ATAS); the Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research Laboratory (CIPHER); the Electronic Systems Laboratory (ELSYS); and the Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory (SEAL).

Ohio State University broke ground in May of 2019 on the $33.5 million Wooster Science Building. Designed by Hasenstab Architects, the 60,000-sf facility will provide the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences with undergraduate chemistry teaching labs, multifunctional classrooms, an entomology research unit, an insect zoo, and a café. The project is located on the school's Wooster campus and will accommodate programs for the Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI) and the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC).

Universities across the country are looking to assemble students and faculty from different research interests in spaces that promote cross-disciplinary collaboration. Successful designs call for exteriors that beckon the entire campus community and flexible interior features that enable the institution to refresh the mix of researchers and projects at regular intervals. Such projects also call for encouraging a campus-wide sense of ownership of the building while establishing a space application review process. Opened in January 2017, the University of Idaho’s $52 million Integrated Research and Innovation Center (IRIC) works to accomplish these goals through building design choices and ongoing space management decisions. Randy Benedict, design leader and principal at NBBJ, and Russell McClanahan, IRIC facility manager, describe how those two activities—design and building management—work to make the IRIC a hub of interdisciplinary interactions at the campus in Moscow, Idaho.

Colorado State University opened the $65 million C. Wayne McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute in May of 2019 in Fort Collins. The 130,000-sf facility provides the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences with equine and small animal surgery suites, flexible research labs, imaging rooms, instructional spaces, a surgical skills training lab, executive offices, and a 200-seat lecture hall.

Virginia Commonwealth University is planning to build a $121 million facility in Richmond to accommodate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Located on the Monroe Park Campus, the six-story, 168,000-sf teaching and research facility will provide wet and dry labs for programs in chemistry, biology, physics, psychology and kinesiology.

Pennsylvania State University began construction in April of 2019 on the Donald P. Bellisario Media Center in University Park. Designed by Studios Architecture, the $43.5 million project includes the renovation of four floors in the existing Willard Building, which was originally built in 1949. Accommodating programs for the Bellisario College of Communications, the 63,131-sf media hub will feature open environments to encourage collaboration and creativity.

The founding institutions of TMC3 have announced a new project team for their planned 37-acre translational research campus in Houston.

Colleges and universities are rethinking their workplaces to align their space with how people work today and to use space to achieve their strategic goals. Beyond macro forces reshaping higher education in terms of access, accountability, and financial stability, there is a confluence of financial, environmental, technological, and cultural factors prompting this change, including increasing numbers of administrative staff and a growing disengagement among faculty and staff. But the most common mistake that institutions make when trying to change their workplace is assuming that they are trying to solve a space problem. Even if the impetus for a project is a space problem—you’re out of space and have no place to put the new faculty or staff member you just hired!—you won’t solve it by thinking about it that way. It’s more complex and nuanced than that. What you need first is a workplace strategy, a coherent statement that describes how your space will be used to help you achieve your larger strategic goals.