George Dark in conversation with Alissa North about the design of

Places of
Learning
14
.12
George Dark in
conversation with Alissa
North about the design
of university campuses—
the strategies and challenges of implementing
new ideas
02
03
Places of
Learning
BIOS/
Alissa North (AN): Thomas Gaines, in The Campus as a Work of Art,
suggests that a campus with less than stellar buildings can still be
successful if the urban open spaces are successful, but that the
reverse doesn’t work. Poorly designed spaces bound by excellent
buildings do not make a good campus. What, from your perspective,
does make a successful campus?
George Dark (GD): If you said that to any provost at a Canadian
university or even a fairly good American university, they would just
laugh. Most universities beyond the very old schools and the Ivy
League are not that strong, in terms of physical design, despite
some being very strong academically.
A campus in the city uses the city, which is richer than any campus
could ever create on its own. We are doing a master plan for the
University of Toronto at Scarborough. Part of the master plan is about
the campus, and part of the master plan is about using the rest of
the land to bring the city to it, to actually make the richness of the
urban experience a big part of the university: to bring in shopping, to
bring in office space, to bring in housing, to bring in a hotel, to put the
Pan American Games on it.
ALISSA NORTH IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO AND A PARTNER IN NORTH DESIGN OFFICE.
GEORGE DARK, OALA, IS A PARTNER IN URBAN STRATEGIES, A TORONTO-BASED PLANNING
AND URBAN DESIGN FIRM.
There are campuses that care very much about their landscape.
The trees at the Harvard Yard, for example, have their own endowment—I think it’s 5 million dollars just to make the trees happy.
Stanford is stunning. Part of it is because the planning group at
Stanford consists of many landscape architects.
01
Places of
Learning
15
.12
04
AN: With those trees, you feel smart just
walking through the Harvard Yard! At the
University of Virginia, you have a clear
image of the lawn; at Oxford, it’s the pristine
courtyards where the stripes of the mow
are always evident. These places have a
strong international reputation for what is
happening inside the buildings, but they
have a really strong visual cohesion, too.
I suspect it has a lot to do with their very
well-designed landscapes.
While at Hargreaves Associates I worked
on the University of Cincinnati master plan.
Hargreaves’ approach is very much about
a guiding master plan and then also
procurring the detailed design work and
taking the projects through to construction.
There was also an interesting synergy with
07
AN: You set the overall vision for it.
What’s the exact mechanism, particularly
on campuses, that allows the vision to
come to fruition?
06
their campus architect, who was on board
with the open space vision, along with their
financial advisor. The three got a lot done in
a short period of time.
GD: I think the thing that’s important at a
university is: First you have to get them into
the business, because in a lot of cases you’ll
find that that kind of work is largely being
controlled by people who do maintenance
and operations so, in general, they are not
attached to the idea of making it better
through design. They have a lot of issues
that need to be dealt with first, like deferred
maintenance and parking.
You are in the business of planning and
urban design, but you don’t do detailed construction. I’ve always been very interested
in this stance, in that a lot of your projects
do get built.
GD: We have a real interest in setting the
stage for excellence to happen. We don’t
even fool ourselves into thinking that we
would be capable of executing some of
these things from the past.
05
I am particularly focused on creating
systems where you have to hire a landscape architect to get you to the end.
I actually have no desire to do any of the
commissions here at Urban Strategies
though I have an intense interest in how
they get done.
01-03/
The Cornell campus master
plan by Urban Strategies Inc.
has been award winning.
IMAGES/
Urban Strategies Inc.
04-07/
The aim of Urban Strategies’
University of Toronto at
Scarborough campus plan has
been to help create a more
self-sustaining, comprehensive
university and less of a satellite.
IMAGES/
Urban Strategies Inc.
Places of
Learning
16
.12
University of Ottawa is a little bit different.
They have run out of space. They don’t have
anywhere to build anything. They were
building into the neighbourhood, which is
never a good thing for a university to do. We
helped them understand how to turn themselves around and go build into the city, to
build up into the downtown. We did many
interviews, and discovered that one of the
reasons people come to school here is that
they actually think they’re going to school in
downtown Ottawa. They think it’s urban. So
we told the rector, “you’ve got this problem.
You’ve been buying land to the west and to
the south, when in actual fact you should
have started a long time ago to buy land to
the north.” We had to actually pick them up
and turn them around to head them in
another direction.
08
You have to convince somebody–and it’s
usually quite high up–that they also have to
go at the public realm; that because they
act like a city, and because they occupy
territory like a city, and they have what are
essentially trees and parks and parkways
and environmental precincts, they should
be behaving the way a city would in
organizing all that. Often, they don’t.
They don’t understand the complexity
of that. They don’t have a high enough
environmental standard for the creeks
that go through, they don’t create good
stormwater management, they do
irresponsible planting, they use annuals
instead of creating perennial gardens,
they don’t look for diversity, they have no
interest in nature in the city…none of that
stuff is usually there, so you have to coax
them into all that. I think that really great
universities have somebody whose job it
is to take care of those things and to
advance those agendas.
04
10
AN: Urban Strategies has done quite a few
university campuses. What’s your approach
to starting on a master plan?
GD: You know, what happens at Urban
Strategies is not a standard business
model–we start everything from scratch.
We don’t pull a drawer open and have
an approach. It’s probably a big business
failing [laughter], but that’s how we do it.
In the case of Cornell, they really wanted
to back up and envision everything. And
we are continuing to do it now. I think at
this point we are looking at the whole
many thousands of acres that they own.
09
11
Brock University is a fairly traditional plan.
How do we do growth? How do we put
new facilities in place? Our new one,
which is OUIT in downtown Oshawa,
is about helping Oshawa become a
big city. It’s about helping OUIT get their
campus growing. The U of T Scarborough
campus plan, which we’re just finishing
now, is aimed at helping them become
less of a satellite and more of a self-sustaining, comprehensive university.
In most cases we’re putting our fingers
on a whole lot of things and drawing them
together. We’re pretty comfortable working
in all kinds of arenas.
Places of
Learning
17
.12
The suburban universities are trying to get out of the parking
business and get themselves closer together. The urban campuses
are running out of space.
AN: Michael Sorkin says: “The university campus is an ideal form of
the city, and campus planning a privileged form of urban planning.
Like a city, a campus supports a complete ecology, including an
idea about community, an enclosed economy, urban density, clear
physical boundaries and set of daily habits that are characteristic of
town life.” I think it’s a very interesting point. You were talking a lot
about the integration of campuses into the city, and Sorkin makes
a strong point about the campus being an entity of its own.
12
AN: Campuses really are complex places that have identities of their
own but are very much tied into the city and even the infrastructural
components of the city.
GD: What’s so remarkable about the histories of universities in
Ontario is that the government decided we needed post-secondary
education and we needed to get it distributed throughout the
province, so virtually the same group of people created all of the
universities almost all in the same vein. They put a ring road around
the outside, they created lots of parking, and they created a very
suburban, spatially separated series of individualized buildings,
which were largely given to individual groups. They didn’t care about
transit because in those days there wasn’t any. The land was free.
Overwhelmingly those places are dominated by parking.
The double cohort made people panic, and then they realized there
is a kind of “post-double cohort” because more people kept coming,
so the universities had to start building. There’s a whole wave of
people trying to re-plan those suburban places. Along the way they
discovered some interesting things. For example, the University
of Ottawa asked whether it was a good idea for every individual
department to have their own building, and they decided to
centralize space that departments could then access.
All of a sudden the world got really interested in mashing things
together. Innovation started to become very important and suddenly
engineering and medicine crashed together. Human ecology was
created as a faculty division. That’s changed a lot. The people who
are going to university now are older. The need to have several
residences has diminished because generally now what happens
is people will go to a residence for one or two semesters at the
most. Universities have also decided they shouldn’t be in the
housing business. Most American universities stopped building
housing twenty-five years go. They’ve mostly privatized housing
to outside companies.
GD: I agree with that completely. I think it’s abundantly true. I think
you could go into cities and describe precinct characteristics, which is
a very common thing to do urbanistically: where is downtown, where
is centre town, where is midtown? Any time you go to a city that has
a university you’ll go study the university campus and start to define it
around its own terms.
AN: What, ultimately, is the role of the landscape on a campus in
terms of higher learning for universities and research institutes?
GD: I think it can operate on many different levels. We are trying to
get the University of Toronto at Scarborough, which owns a vast
piece of valley system, to use that landscape for academic purposes.
The original plantations in the gorge at Cornell were initially part of
the teaching program. Cornell’s rural use of land as outdoor classrooms comes right into the urban campus. That’s why it broke my
heart when they took the barns out of the University of Guelph to
build a big box instructional centre. I think that was the worst thing
they could have done.
I’m a great believer in nature in the city. I think that people have to
learn, or re-learn, about the landscape, and universities can play
that role, as U of T does, and say we have the generosity of the open
space, the nature, the access to sunlight, inside an urban condition
and it’s good for our students, and those who are around us, and
we should share.
AN: Essentially, the campus landscape has a quality that the
university can use for research, they can use it for education,
and also just pure enjoyment.
MANY THANKS TO JENNIFER MAHONEY FOR TRANSCRIBING THIS CONVERSATION.
08-12/
St. George Street, which runs through the
University of Toronto downtown campus,
was revitalized by Brown + Storey
Architects in joint venture with Van
Nostrand Di Castri Architects in an
effort to make the thoroughfare more
attractive and pedestrian friendly.
IMAGES/
Brown + Storey Architects Inc.