While the signature architect endeavor has succeeded in attracting attention and creating first impressions, the Master Plan desperately needed to address a third area: quality of life for students, faculty and staff. A recent revision is now doing just that. "It has undertaken the effort to identify those issues and propose solutions to those problems," Kull says.
"The worst image," McGirr adds, "is of a student running out of class and jumping right into his car to go home." The goal is to make campus so comfortable, so attractive, so convenient that people would neither want nor have to leave.
There are two main components to achieving that Utopia: improving our aesthetics and adding a commercial component. Both will have sufficient impact on creating an improved campus experience for students in the future.
The aesthetic upgrade is already well under way. Eventually, campus will be easily identified by its grassy open spaces, trees, water fountains, benches and amphitheaters. McMicken Commons is the first sign of such progress. The grassy area between McMicken and Tangeman has become a popular warm-weather place for conducting classes, doing homework and taking cat naps.
As popular as it is, however, the area pales in comparison to Sigma Sigma Commons, a large grassy area that opened the fall of 1999 near French Hall. A gift of the Sigma Sigma men's honorary, the newest site comprises a light tower, a stage and an amphitheater. The tower, which lies directly in front of people who enter campus from University Avenue, has seats located in its base intended to encourage students, staff and faculty to mill around.
Eventually, UC will become a pedestrian campus where you won't have to dodge cars. An attractive braided walkway will wind from the registration center, past the student union, through an arboretum and across a massive, lush green area located where the massive parking lot used to sit by the Alumni Center. Then that same area will actually link west campus to the medical campus with an improved pedestrian connector across Martin Luther King Drive, truly uniting the campuses.
Alumni might find it hard to picture sitting by a cascading fountain, watching a dramatic play in a grassy amphitheater or strolling under the trees and past interesting displays that explain the university's history, but that bucolic feel of Burnet Woods will actually exist on campus once again.
Adding a commercial aspect, the second component, is a perfect counterpart.
Overall, the goal is to create a "people-friendly campus," McGirr says, an environment where students, faculty, employees and alumni want to congregate after class and after work. "We want students to be able to handle 90 percent of their daily transactions right here."
The scope of opportunities is broad: retail facilities, a commercial-quality health club, expanded indoor and outdoor recreational facilities, a food court and banking. "We're talking about adding a commercial flair," Kull adds, "to make it more desirable to be here."
Keeping people on campus longer each day achieves more than its own end. Such a convenient and relaxed atmosphere provides opportunities for educational "interactions," as Kull puts it. These interactions, he points out, not only occur in classrooms, but in hallways, on steps outside of buildings and in social settings.
The intent is to have a campus so comfortable that anytime two people are in the middle of a conversation, academic or otherwise, they will be inclined to say, "Let's grab a spot over there and talk about this," he says.
Concerns about keeping people on campus naturally lead to thoughts about establishing a more residential campus. That's next on McGirr's list. "Research proves that students living on campus have higher GPAs and higher retention rates in school," he says.
Therefore, a residential master plan is being undertaken. Not yet complete, it envisions a combination of dormatories, suites and apartments to greatly increase campus housing beyond the approximate 2,800 units we currently have. The tennis courts near Jefferson Avenue constitute the primary residential site, and smaller 50-unit dwellings could be scattered throughout campus for honors students. A joint development with the private sector could add thousands of additional units within a couple blocks of campus, yet wired into the university computer network.
A lot has happened since 1989, when the Master Plan was officially drawn up under the guidance of Hargreaves Associates from San Francisco. It was substantially amended in '94 and revised again in '99. The document deals with countless issues, the least of which, ironically, has been construction of new buildings.
Originally, the placement of 2 million square feet of new buildings was the impetus for the plan. "It was really a defense move to control things already in motion," says McGirr. "All these colleges were doing their own thing, and projects were getting ready to crash into each other."
All siting of new construction was put on hold for a year while the Master Plan was implemented. The general goal was to improve the image of campus by "providing a framework for the placement of buildings," Kull explains.
Rather than creating plans for new buildings themselves, the Master Plan simply imposed structure on projects funded but still in design stages, as well as established policies and a review process for development.
Although the monumental undertaking still has far to go, there is much to be seen. "This has been a drastic change in the composition of campus," Kull says. "We consider this a 100-year move for the university."
"We won't have another shot at changing this much texture of campus for another 100 years," McGirr concurs. "This quantity of change rarely occurs; the last time began in the mid-'50s. People don't have enough energy for this more than twice a century."
It is indeed a Master Plan.
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