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By integrating historic buildings into your campus planning, their continued reuse can help solve some of the specific challenges facing university planners today.
Virtually all college and university campuses have at least one historic building in their inventory and, for many, older buildings comprise a high percentage of building stock. Those buildings are often perceived as more of a burden than anything else, but this does not need to be the case if they are fully integrated into your planning framework. A 2021 article, "Your Campus Historical Buildings: Flagships for a Sustainable Future," contributed by Association for Preservation Technology (APT) authors to Learning by Design, explained the basics of incorporating historic buildings into your campus planning, specifically in the context of sustainability. But how can these structures help to solve some of the specific challenges facing university planners today?
The Spring 2022 edition of the Society for College and University Planning's (SCUP) Trends for Higher Education https://www.scup.org/resource/trendsinside-higher-education-spring-2022/ outlined some of these challenges: planning for a leaner operational model, increased student activism on social and environmental causes, and managing growing backlogs of deferred maintenance. Many challenges described are not necessarily new, but planning professionals are facing them in a changed- and changing-landscape. The concept of resilience is emerging as a touchpoint for planners seeking to meet their current and anticipated future spatial needs, maintain sound financial strategies, and operate efficiently within established institutional frameworks. If you consider historic resources as tools in meeting your specific planning challenges and achieving resilience, they can become assets instead of problems.
Adaptive Reuse as Contemporary Resilience
Colleges and universities are, first and foremost, institutions of higher learning with education as their primary mission. The purpose of a campus's built environment is to support that mission by providing classrooms, offices, dorm rooms, dining halls, and the plethora of other spaces necessary in a living/learning community. However, the buildings of the past often no longer align with the academic and student life experiences institutions want to offer. The "traditional" 20th century (and earlier) classroom featured rows of single desks pointed toward a central teaching wall where the professor would stand and lecture, writing notes on a chalkboard for students to copy. The pedagogical shift within higher education toward experiential learning models, where...