Why Does Bunce Hall Face the Wrong Way?

and other past Rowan planning question marks.

The orientation of Bunce is one of many questions about Rowan's campus building pattern that I often hear from our planning students once they begin to view land use and how it functions (or not) from a planner’s perspective.  Other questions include; "why do campus walkways suddenly end?" and "why is Memorial Hall so difficult to navigate?" and "why are the relatively newly built Townhouses having problems with settling foundations?"  The student’s developing skill to identify many campus land use problems and dysfunctions often trace the root causes to short-sighted past planning decisions.

Backsides tend to be less flattering than front-sides.  Nonetheless, Bunce's rear,
north-facing facade is the view most people get of Rowan's signature building.

Most people know Bunce by its north-facing façade since that is what is visible from route 322 which has become the main thoroughfare into campus and to downtown Glassboro.  This "backside" of Bunce does not make for the most flattering image of our quintessential campus building since it prominently features a two story air conditioning unit and electrical transformer behind the backstage equipment room of Towhill auditorium.  The front-side of Bunce Hall and the view of its majestic green is mostly enjoyed by only a handful of students and a few locals from the adjacent neighborhood.  That is except, of course, for once every May when it becomes the our iconic setting for tens of thousands to gather commencement (well at least until this year). 

Bunce Hall under construction in 1923.  The front of the building faced the
train station - the major mode of access to the campus for five decades.

But the title of this post is really a trick question.  Bunce Hall was actually facing the right way when it was built in 1923.  For its first 50 years there was regular passenger train service to Glassboro that ran until 1971.  Students, faculty and staff would arrive by train and enter Glassboro State College through the gate that opens to the college green and view the majestic front façade of Bunce Hall.  The founders of the college actually got it right.  When it was built, Bunce logically faced the entrance that connected Glassboro to the region.  Route 322 at the time was an infrequently used rural road that ran through farmland.  Parking lot A was an asparagus field and the land where Savitz Hall is located was a peach orchard.  Bunce Hall was facing the right way and that planning decision lasted for half a century.  Since that time, many subsequent planning decisions were far less long lasting than five decades.

Memorial Hall 

One less than prudent decision was to renovate Memorial Hall rather than to tear it down when it had reached the end of its useful life in the late 1990’s.  Memorial Hall was actually several different buildings used for various purposes including the campus cafeteria that were connected by ramps and hallways .  The sprawling conglomerate single story structure spreads out like an octopus consuming a large and prominent land site at the heart of campus but it actually providing relatively little actual usable building floor area.  In planner speak this is called a low Floor Area Ratio (FAR).  Low FAR means that buildings are inefficiently using land, less energy efficient and create more impervious surface which impacts water quality.

Furthermore, portions of Memorial Hall are actually below the grade of ground level which results in the building being prone to flooding during major rain events.  This does not make for the best environment for electronic equipment.  Nevertheless, a cost-saving planning decision was made by a previous administration to renovate Memorial Hall rather than tear it down and rebuild it.  It was decided that the renovated Memorial would house the backbone of Rowan's computing infrastructure.  This cost-saving planning decision has subsequently wound up costing millions of dollars in computer flood damage.  We are still working with engineers today to mitigate the flooding risk of Memorial.  In hindsight, rebuilding on the Memorial site could have been an opportunity to enhance the core of campus with much more efficient and aesthetically worthy building deserving of that prominent campus location.

Memorial Hall, a collection of separate buildings linked by ramps including the old GSC cafeteria,
was long past it's useful life in the late 1990's when it was renovated rather than rebuilt. 

The Townhouses

Another example of short-sighted campus planning is the Townhouse complex.  In 2003 Rowan had an urgent need for additional student housing to meet the increasing demand for residential students.  The university’s first attempt to provide the needed student housing was to purchase the Campus Crossings.  The 18 acre 328 unit apartment complex was on sale for $24 million.   But when issues of mold were uncovered - the administration quickly backed out of the purchase agreement in part because of the negative PR surrounding the perception of mold problems. 

Instead the university opted for a plan to build new townhouses on an 11 acre patch of oak forest that the biology department had used as a study area for decades.  Many of the trees were over 200 years old The administration developed the plans for the townhouses with little input from the campus community and placed an unattainable deadline.  Dozens of trees were clear cut and rather than at least receive lumber value for the wood, the university paid a contractor to have the wood hauled away. (I've been told that the lumber value could have been as much as $500K).  In an attempt to make the unrealistic deadline, the townhouse units were built off-site and trucked in as a time saving strategy.  Foundations were rushed.

The Rowan Townhouse plan was to build 110 units and a parking garage at a projected cost $34M but in the end the tab grew to over $60M with cost overruns and lawsuit settlements.  Architecturally the townhouses were also myopic, turning their backs (with air-conditioning units) to Rt 322 and engineering a now trash-laden retention basin as their most visible feature.  In the decade since they were built, the townhouses have had multiple issues including settling foundations and cracking walls.  In hindsight it becomes clear that rushing this project was a costly misadventure.  The university should have stuck with the Campus Crossings purchase.  If we did, we would have added 328 housing units as well as 18 acres to Rowan's campus assets for a cost of $24M plus whatever the cost of mold remediation would have been (let's generously say 1 or 2 million).  But through less-than-prudent planning decisions, we actually spent over $60M to clear cut dozens of climax oak trees on property that we already owned to get 110 housing units and a parking garage.  With four beds per unit, that comes to a cost of $160,000 per bed and parking space.  The shoddy workmanship on the rushed townhouses, by the way, has resulted in mold issues.

 

The Rowan Townhouses were built in a formerly wooded area of campus under an unrealistically short deadline.  The rushed project wound up not making its deadline and nearly doubling its original cost estimation.

Of course hindsight is 20/20.  It’s easy to criticize these land use blunders of past administrations.  No university president sets out to make bad land use decisions.  But seeds of poor outcomes can be traced, in part, to a less than comprehensive approach to planning, to over confidence by decision makers in their own ideas at the disregard of alternate points of view, to closed-door decision making, and to lack of substantive stakeholder input.  The Townhouse story highlighted many of these weak points that can occur in university land use decision making.

The Most Powerful Land Use Position in America

It's interesting to note how a public university president is in one of the most powerful positions for land use decision-making with some of the fewest checks and balances or oversight.  As a public entity, a university has the ability to publicly bond financing.  It has the legal power to employ eminent domain for acquiring land from unwilling sellers.  A public university in New Jersey does not have to abide by local zoning regulations.  A public university is tax-exempt and thus does not have to pay taxes on the property value of its real estate. And, other than compliance to safety regulations of the NJ Division of Community Affairs, public universities have few other mechanism of oversight or review for land use decisions by which they must abide.

Yes administrations usually hire expensive consultants to expedite plans for university projects that they put forward but consultants generally don't offer critical oversight to ill-conceived planning initiatives but instead provide whatever it is they will be paid to produce.  A university administration has the ultimate power to generally do what they want as long as they can sell it to the board of trustees with no requirement to have public hearings.  In the past this has resulted in pushing through shortsighted projects that at the time may have seemed well-conceived at the time but in the end wind up being costly and resulting in dysfunctional land use patterns of our campus today.

I’m hopeful that President Houshmand will be following a different course in campus planning than past administrations.  One important sign that he may is the initiative to add a Storm Water Management and Landscape element to the Sasaki master plan. This plan will help to mitigate some of the past planning errors that have resulted in the major flooding events that have become a monthly occurrence on campus.  The fact that the Houshmand administration is beginning our new development phase with a first planning initiative to protect the environment is the right way to start so that we don’t repeat the environmental mistakes of past planning examples.  But it remains to be seen if this administration will be will be fully embracing the language, spirit and intent of the Sasaki master plan that was developed as a balance to poor previous planning missteps.

The Townhouse Silver Lining – the Sasaki Master Plan

Going back to the townhouses, the final costs in dollars, environmental impact, squandered land use potential as well as lost confidence in the administration by the campus community is still reverberating today in expanded debt service and cynicism of campus stakeholders.  Fortunately one of the positive outcomes of the Townhouse fiasco was the initiation of a campus master planning process in order to plan of the long range future development of campus and avoid the costly mistakes of the Townhouses.  The process was open.  A campus master planning committee with broad representation from across the entire university community was established and ultimately the Sasaki planning firm was hired at the cost of $2.5 million to create a nationally worthy campus master plan .

A number of campus master planning subcommittees with broad campus representation were formed and worked with Sasaki for over a year and a half.  More than 9 months alone was spent on the Guiding Principles which were created as a guide for gauging future planning decisions.  The Guiding Principles were central to the plan because it was realized that circumstances and the map would change in unpredictable ways but as long as the principles endured, the best outcomes would be achieved.

The Sasaki Master Plan Guiding Principles (p. 86 Appendix A) are the collective voice of the Rowan community and should continue to be the primary gauge by which current planning initiative are gauged.  The Guiding Principles call for a Campus Master Planning Committee to be maintain to steer campus development away from myopic land use decisions that result in dysfunctional land use outcome and toward more comprehensive smart growth patterns that function well for decades.  I am hopeful that our current administration will stay true to the Guiding Principles of the Sasaki Master Plan, re-initiate an open master planning process and avoid land use decisions that result in regretful future dysfunctional land use outcomes.

Dysfunctional versus Functional Land Use

What do I mean by functional versus dysfunctional land use?  It goes back to the adage that “form follow's function."  As an analogy, lets look to the human body and its' elegant design so classically captured by Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of the Universal Man (below left).  For the human body to be functional it requires that things are in the right location, at the right scale, and properly connected to the right systems in the right proportions.  Imagine how well the human body would function if it did not have the right form, scale, and connections (below center).  Likewise, the development of land in a haphazard piecemeal fashion where things are in the wrong place at the wrong scale and poorly coordinated results in a land use pattern that is not very functional.

Form and function are directly related to one another as illustrated by the da Vinci's illustration of the Universal Man (left).  Imagine how well the human body would function if it was put together in a manner similar to many examples of haphazard sprawling land development (center).  Which pattern does Rowan's campus land use (right) most closely emulate? 

Looking at Rowan campus from above I leave it to the reader to decide which da Vinci sketch Rowan campus is more like and how functional the resulting campus land use is.  Hopefully, the pending development growth of campus will take a longer-term perspective and strive toward a more functional outcome that can last and be improved for decades to come.  Bunce Hall faced the right way for five decades before Rowan’s growth and the prominence of the automobile changed the equation.  Let’s emulate the planning integrity of Bunce's architects and strive to make land use decisions that last for at least 5 decades.

In the next blog post I’ll be looking at the coming light rail station and the imperative for Rowan to get the comprehensive planning for the station right.  For it would be ironic if Rowan's oldest building, Bunce Hall faces a train station that no longer functions while one of Rowan's new business building is built on Parking Lot A with its backside being the view that one is met with as one steps off our new station to come.