The face of education is changing. Technology-driven teaching, multidisciplinary subject groupings and non-traditional learning experiences prevail. Nowhere is this change more prevalent than in U.S. colleges and universities. Smart classrooms, high-tech environments and campuses that build intellectual community, are
visibly changing the look and feel of modern education.

As educational trends evolve, so must the structures that contain them.
Cooper Carry’s Education Practice is providing innovative thinking to colleges
and universities across the Middle Atlantic, offering informed solutions to the challenges of technology, campus-making and urban integration faced by universities today. From residential facilities to libraries, classrooms to research laboratories, Cooper Carry is an emerging leader in educational architecture for
the 21st Century.

We asked Cooper Carry Education Studio Associate Directors Tim Fish and Mark Jensen about what’s new on campus, and about how architecture aids the pursuit of knowledge in America’s colleges and universities.

After the interview, you’ll find a series of short articles and profiles that offer greater insight into Cooper Carry’s latest education-market projects.

What is the state of affairs in the educational architecture market right now? What are some of the trends you see developing?
TF: There is some significant change underway. Student populations continue to show significant growth. Schools are competing for the best students, and the expectations of those students include superior facilities. Schools are very interested in creating efficient and inspired learning environments. Sustainable design is important. So is making the most out of space and budgets.

What’s driving that change?
MJ: There are several factors. Finances are one. Budgets are pinched at universities. Private support is more important than ever. Academically, there is a decided shift toward more an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary kind of learning, both in teaching and research. The structures that house these disciplines have
to address this change.

Also, many campuses are finding that there are serious space challenges to expansion. At many universities, commercial growth is limiting the directions in which a campus can develop.

As universities look for ways to address these growth issues, they are keen to maintain the special identities of their campuses. They are rightfully unwilling to sacrifice the unique sense of community to accommodate growth. In fact, they want to create more community. We are finding that intelligent design can resolve many of these problems, and even increase the interactivity that leads to a heightened sense of community.

TF: Space is valuable. Extra space costs money. And unusable space is an inefficiency that costs you in the end. We realize the value of extra space and
have begun to understand how what was formerly thought of as extra space—
those “spaces between”—can ultimately be put to use. Those “spaces between”
are where chance encounters in learning happen. They are where community
starts, and where a student can meet a professor to ask a question about class
or meet a peer for coffee. Building or augmenting the campus community in that
way is at the heart of the emerging change that we’re seeing.

How has Cooper Carry Education created sustainable, efficient, interactive spaces for universities?
TF: The student learning center at the University of Georgia is a good example. That building is a hybrid between a traditional classroom building and an electronic library. So, it’s responding to this new way of thinking by bringing various groups
of people together and giving them places for collaboration, interaction and learning—outside the classroom. It is important to note that this project was originally conceived as two buildings, one satisfying a need for more classroom space and the other more library space. By combining the two functions we
created cost-efficiencies that positively impacted the budget, and we created an
educational environment that is far more useful and interactive than separate buildings would have ever been. By creating a multi-use facility, we did more
for less.

How do you reconcile this modern approach to learning with the more conservative aesthetic demands of an older campus?
MJ: The University Center we have designed for Mercer University in Macon combines both. If you look at the center, you’ll find a remarkably interactive
series of spaces combined in a single structure. A variety of athletic functions
are combined with study rooms, administrative and social functions. It feels
like a series of buildings, when in fact it is one.

Yet while the interior has a completely modern functionality, the exterior
addresses the aesthetic traditions of the college, incorporating brick and cast
stone accents that reflect the more Victorian heritage of the original buildings
on campus.

What about emerging colleges that need to establish a campus aesthetic?
TF: Floyd College is a prime example of a college with an evolving aesthetic. The Bartow Center we’re creating is designed to house classrooms, a library and administration for a new campus in Cartersville. The building will initiate a new campus aesthetic, one that responds to its regional context without losing the sense that this is a campus environment. Functionally, our goal was to create an interactive environment so that the campus would have a collaborative, community feel from the very beginning. We’ve designed it so that it can ultimately be subsumed by other, more prominent buildings as the college grows.East Central Technical College in Fitzgerald, Georgia, is a college that decided to change its existing aesthetic. As it stands, the campus really lacks the cohesiveness you
find at well-planned universities. Buildings exist in a sea of parking. There is a
lack of cohesive exterior space. Our goal was to transform ECTC from a school
into a campus, give it a new identity, and help make the college a regional leader
in telecommunications training and technology.

We have masterplanned a series of quadrants connected by open landscape spaces. We wanted to create a sense of community on the campus and bring people together. That’s the nature of the telecommunications business and, to
their credit, ECTC understood the need to reflect the nature of telecom in their
learning environment. We believe we’ve created a more appealing environment,
one that will ultimately create connections between the student body and local
and regional community businesses—the facility is designed for use by students
and business.

Is the collaborative learning initiative something new to colleges and universities?
MJ: Today, the way we work is much more collaborative than it was ten or twenty years ago. Most corporations—where college and university students are headed after graduation—are much more collaborative. So in the last decade or so, it’s become much more of a focus to the schools. Within the floor plan of the UGA project, there are 96 group study rooms, computer carrels with room for two or more students to sit around them, and convenient study-areas within the main circulation space, close to classrooms, where those chance learning encounters can take place.

How successful have these new features been?
TF: The UGA Student Learning Center just opened this fall, and the group study rooms regularly have people in them working together. On the whole, it’s been a very good thing for the colleges’ budgets too. There has traditionally been a
useable versus gross area ratio we tried to adhere to. It was a dollar-driven formula, and to achieve the ratio you needed it was common practice to make hallways more narrow and common areas smaller, since they were considered to be unusable spaces. Efficiency was often measured by how little space was left over outside the classrooms. Now, we’re doubling that pass-through space because we’ve found that much of learning takes place in that three-second encounter between students and faculty as they move from one class to another. Because of this, the ratio becomes less important. Now, in terms of the total building, there is no dead space. All space becomes useable space.

Does that useable space extend outside the classroom to the campus as a whole?
MJ: Absolutely. As a general rule, when working in a university setting, you never develop a single building without studying its relationship to other facilities within the school. And beyond a particular school, you have to consider how what you
are doing relates to the university as a whole. Each campus has its own architectural vocabulary. Being aware of that special language creates cohesion
on a campus and helps to create community.

TF: Access is also important to developing a sense of community. Architects
used to put campus buildings smack in the middle of parking lots. We would almost never do that now. Today, colleges and universities are working to keep vehicles out of that common pedestrian space. We make an effort to move the circulation and traffic to the perimeter of a campus, so the core can be people space—collaborative, social space.

Are most universities headed in this direction?
MJ: Most understand the value of good design, and we often end up addressing
the sins of the past. Universities have begun to recognize that the modern architecture built on campuses in the last thirty to forty years is a real departure from the original structures. Core building patterns have been broken, which
always affects the cohesion of a campus and how it flows. You can actually see where there has been a shift in thought. It’s not simply an aesthetic issue either.
It can have a direct impact on recruiting. We tell our university clients that a student’s first impression of a college is not simply a product of the buildings they see, but of the interconnectedness of those buildings. University leaders want to create community—but is that community encouraged by the architecture of
the campus?

TF: Emory, UGA, and Mercer University are good examples of schools that really recognize both the value of traditional architectural design and the virtue in keeping a certain style across the entire campus. They also recognize that university buildings are evolving very quickly, and that technology in the classroom and the specialized nature of specific disciplines are forcing new buildings to become very state of the art, at least on the inside. And yet you have to remember, while you
are outfitting a structure for 21st Century learning, that you are dealing with history as well, and that you have to address that history and ensure that the new is successfully integrated with the old. In other words, you can’t forget where you came from. 

Campuses sometimes change with their administrations. What are the administrative motives for changing a campus aesthetic?
MJ: They often have different strategies than their predecessors. Years ago we asked the president of Georgia Tech what his strategy for the college was, and
how the development he had planned would play into that strategy. And what we got was probably the clearest expression of campus strategy we’ve ever heard.
He said, “Georgia Tech will become the preeminent institution for undergraduate education, anywhere.” Georgia Tech, like most schools, is attempting to attract
the best and brightest students from around the world. They want students from Russia, China, everywhere—not simply American students—to think of Georgia Tech first when they think of the best engineering and undergraduate institutions. And subsequently they’ve done it. They’re also highly ranked in graduate study areas like aerospace, industrial engineering and computer science.

So ultimately the architecture of a university becomes a recruitment tool?
TF: It does. On a variety of different levels, such as the technology in the classrooms, the walkability of a campus, and especially the student housing.
For example, when we’re thinking about a college like Georgia Tech, where the student body is extremely diverse and many come from outside the United States, we think about how student housing will compete with off-campus housing in Atlanta. Much of it compares poorly because the campus housing is old and was built before there were attractive off-campus options. Urban growth has changed
the perception of campus housing. We’re currently addressing that very issue at Georgia Tech. We’re creating new married and family housing that we believe will help stem the flow of students away from campus and help bring the best and brightest students to Georgia Tech.

How do you create on-campus housing that rivals what’s available off-campus? There are so many options these days.
TF: Take the Georgia Tech family housing project for example. You create privacy in each dwelling, to ensure that residents don’t feel they are sacrificing by living
on-campus. You bring technology—information access—to the buildings, making them a better fit for academic lifestyles. You can create style and convenience through commercial relationships that make the development mixed-use. The proximity of retail business, for instance, helps make the development walkable
and helps create the sense of community universities and students want. These features—and others—can lure students back to campus, and income back to
the university. Ultimately these features  revive campus culture, which will have a greater long-term value than anything else you accomplish.

The multi-use environment, then, addresses several issues: not only budgetary considerations, but also a fundamental shift in the educational model and the emerging pressures campuses are facing from a space standpoint?
MJ: That’s absolutely right. Ultimately, in any application, when you work on a campus where there is any sense of history, you begin the creative process by recognizing that your building is not the first and it is not going to be the last. Your design is one in a river of designs. So, you need to reach back and make visual connections with what came before, all while looking ahead to anticipate the changing state of education. Designing with respect for history saves your campus. Designing for modern learning saves your budget. If you do both, a community is created. That is how community is built, and how educational architecture
has evolved.