All Posts Tagged With: "Green Higher Education"

Boston-based Anna Beha Architects (”ABA”) has designed a renovation and expansion of Princeton University’s Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding, whose building dates from 1901 and was formerly one of the school’s eating clubs. The project recently broke ground and contemplates a 5080-square-foot addition to the original, Italianate-style base building, which will house 18,8000 square feet of programming, office, and classroom space. The architect’s challenge was to reclaim the building’s original design, which it discovered through researching the university’s archives had been buried by a series of poorly executed previous renvovations. ABA was charged with creating useable outdoor space, as well as visible entry points into the structure.

The Richard Stockton College expansion project is an excellent case study for how to build green in a small space while acknowledging development’s impact on its natural surroundings. Richard Stockton was originally constructed in 1973 on New Jersey’s Pinelands National Park Reserve before the land was protected. The Pinelands include over one million acres of farms, wetlands, and forest and are located in the center of the southern part of the state. Expanding Stockton’s existing site footprint would have translated into additional costs and time through the NJDEP/Pinelands permitting process. Instead, the school decided to simply build on top of an existing one-story laboratory building.

A new dorm at Queens College will seek a LEED Silver rating from USGBC, but local residents are more concerned with the impact to the neighborhood from the 506-bed facility- particularly from student parking- rather than the project’s sustainable features. The dorm, which will be located at 64-80 Kissena Boulevard, will feature 144 units across one building constructed in three-, four-, and five-story wings connected by a series of walkways. The 156,000-square-foot dorm will include an underground parking garage with capacity for 89 cars, and the college will create an additional 100 scattered throughout the rest of the campus.

The Baruch College newspaper The Ticker has a nice wrap-up this week of all the green initiatives going on at CUNY schools across the City. CUNY is New York’s largest university system, with 23 campuses and 280 buildings. Over the past ten years, CUNY has invested $110 million in upgrading its facilities to make them more eco-friendly. The science lab at Bronx Community College, for example, runs entirely off solar panels on its roof, and two more solar roofs are planned at LaGuardia Community College and Kingsborough Community College. CUNY’s first eco-friendly science building just opened at Lehman College and additional sustainable science buildings are planned for City College and Brooklyn College.

New York University daily student newspaper Washington Square News reported yesterday on the recent efforts by NYU to reduce its environmental footprint and increase awareness of green issues. The NYU administration recently announced three new sustainability initiatives designed to save energy and money, as well as educate students and faculty. NYU Sustainability Task Force project administrator Jerry Friedman told the paper that university has “the opportunity to be a leader in environmental scholarship. No school is doing more than we are.” Among the environmental programs planned are an Educating for Sustainability lecture series and a “teach-in” related to green building. Robert Gottleib, author of the book Forcing the Spring: Transforming the American Environmental Movement, will be speaking about urban environmental policy on March 10, and past lecture topics include global warming and ecology.