Page 24 - College Planning & Management, September 2017

Facilities CAMPUS SPACES
The Gathering Spot
Student centers are often the heart of the campus community. They play a major
role in student life, recruitment and retention, town/gown relationships, alumni
support and more. The first impression they make should be a welcoming one.
BY SCOTT BERMAN
STUDENT, UNIVERSITY AND CAMPUS CENTERS are flagship structures in coveted locations. The centers’ many functions are crucial, with implications for student
life, town and gown relationships, alumni and donors. Accord- ingly, their exteriors make important impressions.
Student centers, for example, now “represent one of the few campus environments that belong to the entire campus com- munity — not a specific college or dean,” architect Jeff Stebar of Perkins+Will tells College Planning & Management, “They truly are the ‘family room’ of campus.”
That room, so to speak, starts and ends at the exterior, with elements such as furnishings, bollards, fencing and masonry gates helping to define circulation and security as well as ideas of place
in bustling, high-profile campus locales. Moving to the buildings themselves, façades start that process of defining ideas. In fact, as Stebar says, “façades become critically important to projecting a welcoming, inviting and vibrant beacon of student life; at the same time blending with the surrounding existing architectural context.”
How do some current and recent projects on the exteriors
of such buildings speak to those buildings’ prime importance? There are perhaps as many ways as there are centers, owing to the unique conditions and goals that can be found on any campus. The façades, outdoor lighting and furnishings, and broader contexts of three such projects — at University at Albany SUNY, the Universi- ty of Kentucky, and Sheridan College in Wyoming — offer recent, interesting and varied examples.
24 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / SEPTEMBER 2017
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