A Photographic Tour of an Urban College Campus

[simms3]

Missfixit: Thanks!  I was a brother there, too.  There are big plans for the house including a potential multi-million dollar renovation/addition that's been in the works for several years.  When I was a sophomore, we had an alum who was about to commit $2M for the project, and unfortunately during a visit on Homecoming a recent alum was drunk and lobbed a yogurt through the air, which hit the donor in the head.  Plans back on hold   This summer I think the house will see a redo of the front yard, though.

billy: Awesome!  What was your major and what is your nephew's major if you don't mind me asking?

blandman: Thanks!  Eh, maybe I exaggerated by "a lot," but I have a few friends that lived a block off campus and were all robbed at gunpoint in their townhome.  Even the dog was stolen.  I'd say we get a Clery notice about once a month (maybe every 2-3 weeks) for armed robbery and maybe once every couple months for aggravated assault.  Petty larceny happens all the time, as to be expected.

BTW, I was there for 4.5 years, too!  Just graduated in December.  I noticed you're in Philly.  Are you from Jax?  What did you study at Tech?  You'd be shocked at how many students attend now.  I think with undergrad and grad when I started, there might have been 15,000 students.  Now there are about 20,000 with a future (hopefully) permanent cap at 22,000.  I'm worried they are going to dilute the value of a Tech education.  MIT has I think about 8-9,000 students total...Caltech even fewer.

Edit: On that note, when I lived at the North Ave Apts, which were gated and sealed, we still somehow had bums in the quads and premises all the time.  I remember taking an elevator up to my place and a bum entered, and I am absolutely positive he had never been on an elevator.  It freaked him out haha.  He waited for the rest of us to push our floors before he pushed "6."  It was pretty funny, but smelly.

[Lunican]

There is an interesting take on an urban campus under construction in Chicago now. It would be great to see UNF or FSCJ do something like this in Downtown Jax.

Roosevelt Goes Vertical

Roosevelt University has broken the ground on a 32-story academic building that will be the second tallest university building in the country and the sixth tallest in the world. A unique vertical campus, it will have classrooms, laboratories, offices, dorm rooms, a dining hall, fitness facilities and student services all under one roof. Roosevelt is not just constructing a building; it is creating a great university experience.

Basement
Space for physical resources
Space for textbook storage
Mechanical systems

First Floor
Two-story main lobby
Admissions office
Security desk
Bookstore entrance at the Fine Arts Annex
Seven elevators

Mezzanine
Financial aid
Student accounts
Advising
Portion of the registrar’s office
Academic Success Center

Second Floor
Dining center with 313 seats; open to students and faculty and staff members
Bridge connecting the dining center with the Fainman Lounge in the Auditorium Building (the bridge and another connection to Auditorium Building will make this floor a campus crossroads)
Catering services

Third Floor
Large multipurpose room for lectures, movies, concerts
Career-services offices
Offices for student activities and student organizations
TV lounge

Fourth Floor
Conference area for 100 people with large, medium, and small conference rooms
Catering services
Rehearsal space for the Auditorium Theatre

Fifth Floor
Recreation center open to students and faculty and staff members with weights and cardiovascular equipment
Two multipurpose rooms for exercise, yoga, and martial arts
Locker rooms

Sixth Floor
Large classrooms holding 96 and 108 students
Two smaller classrooms
Conference room

Seventh Floor
Chemistry floor with two teaching labs and one research lab
Faculty offices

Eighth Floor
Biology floor, with three teaching labs, student-research lab, and conference room
Departmental offices

Ninth Floor
Biology-research lab
Faculty offices
Physics teaching lab
78-student classroom
Conference room

10th Floor
Four general classrooms
Learning laboratory
Small rooms for breakout meetings

11th Floor
24 private offices for the College of Business Administration
One tiered and one regular classroom

12th Floor
Offices for the business dean and assistant deans
Learning-lab trading floor
Classrooms
Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate

13th Floor
Offices for the president, provost, and CFO and their staffs
Two conference rooms

14th Floor
Transfer floor to student housing
Security desk
Resident-life offices
Program room for meetings
Three elevators that go up to residential floors; four elevators that go down, serving the rest of the building

15th Floor
Laundry room
TV Room

16th to 31st Floors
Hhousing for more than 600 students (double and single suites)
Rooms for residence assistants
Student lounges facing east, toward Lake Michigan

[stjr]

Another well known urban campus is the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Below are a handful of internet pix followed, unless otherwise noted, by a sampling of pictures and building  description's (they have hundreds of buildings) derived from the University's virtual tour on their web site.  They state the current urban campus amounts to about 280 acres (I believe with the recent "Penn Connect" additions [see map notation below] they may actually be over 300 acres).  From visiting, I find it is unusual for its compactness and containment of all it's graduate and undergraduate schools on one campus.  Also, it has quite a diversity of architectural styles spanning nearly 150 years (this is not the original campus being that its founding was 1740) woven into the campus.  Penn considers itself a leader in integrating itself with the City and West Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding its perimeter, providing social, medical, and educational resources to low income areas.

With respect to downtown Jacksonville, I have noted before, it needs a residential university in its midst and our city "planners" could learn much from university campus designs about the co-existence of mixed use facilities and catering to pedestrians and bicyclists.  Any campus today can not afford to fail in this regard and be successful at attracting students.  I would think the same applies to urban environments.  I suggest the Chamber consider visiting a variety of urban campuses in major and mid-sized cities to see how to get a lot of use from a compact area.  Note also, other than maybe a campus bus system, universities generally have tens of thousands of people moving about within significantly sized campuses (relative to our core downtown) area without the benefit of mass transit modes such as elaborate "people movers" or other rail based systems.

Descriptions posted apply to pictures above.


Campus map of Penn campus highlighting medical school facilities.  Note juxtaposition with adjacent Drexel University, 30th Street Station, the Schuylkill River, and Downtown Philadelphia.  The area from 30th Street Station to behind Franklin Field (the football stadium) to South Street along the Schuylkill River is undergoing a multibillion dollar conversion from industrial use to multiuse.  More on this urban renewal project and its buildings & park spaces can be found at Penn Connect, the name given due to its "connecting" the campus to the center of the city: http://www.pennconnects.upenn.edu/




School of Medicine Addition






Campus statue of Ben Franklin, founder of the University of Pennsylvania.


Richards Medical Building designed by Louis I. Kahn:
"It was the Richards Medical Building (1957-61) on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania that was a true breakthrough for Kahn in the form of critical acclaim in and outside of the architectural sphere. Some of the major themes that characterized Kahn’s work were evident in our guided tour: heavy external massing that clearly demarcated “served” and “servant” spaces, rigid geometrical structural systems, refinement of exposed materials, and the dissolution of the corner. Kahn’s use of concrete cantilever technology in the medical labs allowed for the creation of a space that did not depend on structural support at the corner, hence the ability to leave large expanses of glass meeting at a point on the far end of the lab." ( http://sahstudytours.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/louis-i-kahn-study-tour-institutional-work-photos-and-text-by-amber-wiley/ )


"Hill College House is one of the largest college houses (undergraduate dormitories) at the University of Pennsylvania. Hill was designed in 1958 by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who also designed the St. Louis Arch, the former TWA Flight Center at New York City's Kennedy Airport, and Dulles Airport. The building was unusual for its time, incorporating an interior atrium. Once a women's dormitory, Hill is now co-ed. In common with other buildings constructed at the height of the Cold War, the basement of Hill contains a fallout shelter, which links to the University's utility tunnels." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_College_House )


Franklin Field is the oldest two-tiered stadium in the country with a seating capacity of approximately 52,000. The Penn Relays, the oldest organized relay competition in the United States (it began in 1895), is held every year in April. The Relays bring together the best track and field athletes from high schools and colleges worldwide. Parents may remember when the field was the home of the Army-Navy football game and the Philadelphia Eagles. The first televised football game was also played here in 1940.


The Palestra, which seats 9,000, was the site of the first NCAA championship in 1939. This legendary sports arena was opened in 1927 and has hosted more games, visiting teams, and NCAA tournaments than any other college facility in the country. In addition to more than sixty years of Penn basketball and thirty years of Big Five doubleheaders, the building has seen fifty NCAA tournament games as part of nineteen national championship competitions.


University hotel adjacent to Penn's archaeological museum, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania complex, and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.


College Hall, completed in 1873, was the first building constructed on the University's present site. It once housed all functions of the University and now contains the offices of the President, Provost, and Undergraduate Admissions, as well as classrooms. College Hall is also home to the Philomathean Society, a student organization founded in 1813.

You may have seen a version of College Hall without being aware of it. When Lurch the butler answers the door at the home of Morticia and Gomez Addams, it is College Hall that you see. Cartoonist and Penn alumnus Charles Addams is said to have used the building as his inspiration for the mansion of the Addams Family.


The Green is the center of campus and most students pass through it several times a day. In spring and fall, students use the lawns for reading, studying, or just catching some rays. John J. Boyle's statue of Benjamin Franklin marks the center of The Green.

Irvine Auditorium is the location for many Penn ceremonies, speaking engagements, movies, and concerts. The balcony houses the eleventh-largest pipe organ in the world, the Curtis Organ, which was built for the Sesquicentennial Exhibition in 1926, and donated to the University in 1928. Each Halloween, the silent movie, The Phantom of the Opera, is shown in Irvine, complete with organ accompaniment.

Penn has fifteen libraries, located throughout the campus, housing a collection of over 4.5 million volumes. The newly renovated Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center holds the main social sciences and humanities collections, the Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, Penn's rare books and manuscript collections, two computer labs, and the Goldstein Undergraduate Center in the Rosengarten Reserve Room, which is open for study all night during the fall and spring semesters. There are lounges, study carrels, group study and seminar rooms, and over 150 public computers for student use in the Center.

Penn's original library, from the Victorian house of Charles Henry Lea, is installed on the sixth floor, where an adjacent exhibition gallery is lined with woodwork from a 15th-century house in Chester, England.

Houston Hall was the country's first student union, and it remains in service to students to this day. The lower level is a campus eatery, offering many varieties of food, retail shops, and a game room. The Hall of Flags is available for evening events. The first floor houses the University's information center, a cafe, music room and a large study lounge. The upper floors contain performance spaces, meeting rooms and offices for student organizations.


Claudia Cohen Hall, formally known as Logan Hall, is home to the College at Penn. Built in the Victorian Gothic style, it is one of three original buildings erected on Penn's current site. It was the second building constructed by the University on its West Philadelphia campus.

Completed in 1874, its original purpose was to house the Medical School. First known as Medical Hall, it was renamed Logan Hall in 1906 to honor James Logan, a founding trustee of the College of Philadelphia, Penn's predecessor. It was renamed Claudia Cohen Hall in 2008 in honor of journalist and Penn alumna Claudia Cohen.


Fisher Fine Arts Library, originally the University library, was rechristened the Furness Building when the University's main collection moved to the new Van Pelt Library and the old building was turned over to the Graduate School of Fine Arts. It was renamed again to honor the generosity of Anne and Jerome Fisher in 1991.

Designed by Frank Furness, the renowned Philadelphia architect, it was completed in 1891. This work was a breakthrough for modern architecture and an important step in the evolution of library design. Furness designed this innovative structure to be the first library with a specialized reading room, lit by skylights and clerestory windows, and a detached book "stack," specifically designed for the fireproof storage of books.

For much of the twentieth century, the Furness building was harshly criticized for its rebellious, unconventional style, a response that led to the later neglect and destruction of many of Furness' other buildings. The Fisher Fine Arts Library is considered by some to be the quietest place on campus to study. Its most recent claim to fame: a scene from the movie Philadelphia was filmed here.


The Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories provide Penn with 102,000 square feet of new facilities for cutting-edge research in bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, and medicine.


Established in 1887, the University Museum was the first anthropological museum on any American university campus and is one of the most renowned anthropology museums in the world. Known for its studies of ancient societies, the museum houses one of the largest archaeological and anthropological collections in the United States. A library, research facilities, and ongoing publishing projects are all centers of activity. The collections are exceptionally rich in Chinese, Near Eastern, Greek, African, Pacific, Egyptian, and South American artifacts.

The great Chinese Rotunda was added in 1912-1915, the Coxe Wing (housing the Egyptian collections) went up in 1926, and the Sharpe wing--designed to be the front door of the museum--was completed in 1929. The later work was designed by Charles Klauder, Day's former partner. The museum's large academic wing, accommodating the library and classrooms and offices for the anthropology department, was constructed in 1968-71 according to a design by Romaldo Giurgola and Ehrman Mitchell. The latest addition, the Mainwaring wing, is the work of Atkin, Olshin, Lawson-Bell and Associates.

The Towne Building, which is the main building of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was built in 1903-06. Next to the Towne Building is the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, established in 1923. Between 1943-1946, ENIAC (Electrical Numeric Integrator and Computer), the world's first all-electronic, large scale, digital computer was created here.

The Law School moved into this impressive Georgian-style building by Cope and Stewardson in 1900, 110 years after America's first law lectures were delivered at Penn by James Wilson, a constitutional scholar whose work laid the foundation for the American system of jurisprudence. Penn Law today is known for its innovative cross-disciplinary approach to legal education.


Completed in 1990-91, the Institute of Contemporary Art building has soaring two-story galleries, an educational center and a garden terrace.

The University Bookstore with 130,000 titles including approximately 90,000 academic books, making it one of the most comprehensive academic bookstores in the country.


The Arts, Research and Culture House (ARCH) houses the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, and also serves as home for a number of ethnic heritage groups.

The Annenberg School for Communication


The Annenberg Center is a performing arts center with three theaters.


The Pottruck Health & Fitness Center is a new multi-purpose activity area designed for campus sport totalling 115,000 square feet.


The McNeil Building is home to the Economics and Sociology Departments, as well as the university's Career Services office.


Quadrangle: The earliest buildings in the Quad were constructed in the 1890's. Today, the Quad encompasses 38 interlocking buildings surrounding five interior courtyards. Three of Penn's twelve College Houses call the Quad home.

The Leidy Laboratory, a Cope and Stewardson building, stands on Hamilton Walk and was built in 1910-11. Behind Leidy stands the Kaplan Wing, built in two phases: 1959-1960 and 1963-64. Behind the Kaplan wing is the Seely Mudd biological Research Laboratory, built 1984-86. The Bio Pond, located behind these facilities, provides a taste of nature on campus and a popular spot to relax or study on sunny days.


The Wharton School, the oldest collegiate school of business in the country, celebrated the 125th anniversary of its foundation in 2006. Part of the 100th anniversary commemoration was the complete renovation of Dietrich Hall and the new Steinberg Hall, which fills the forecourt of the older building.


In August 2002, the Wharton School opened a new $139.9 million, 327,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art academic center. Jon M. Huntsman Hall is one of the world's most advanced facilities for management education. It houses the Wharton Undergraduate and Graduate Divisions, as well as the Marketing, Legal Studies, Statistics, and Operations and Information Management Departments. The building is open 24 hours per day.


Graciously endowed by alumnus Paul Kelly, the Writers House serves as a place where all Penn writers can come for courses, readings, informal meetings, and writing advice.

Located in a mid-nineteenth-century building in Hamilton Village, Civic House is the campus hub for student community service activity.


This 70,000-square-foot facility, opened in 2002 during the school's 125th Anniversary celebration, is the new gateway to Penn's School of Dental Medicine, tying together the School's historic Thomas W. Evans Building (built in 1915) and its Leon Levy Center for Oral Health Research.