November 2014
Building for Tomorrow
Engineering colleges are upgrading their facilities to adapt to new ways of teaching and better prepare a growing number of students.
BY EVA KAPLAN-LEISERSON
O
n campuses around the country, excavations are getting underway, foundations are being poured, and structural steelwork is rising into the air. In other spaces, walls are coming down, hallways are opening up, and light is flooding in. New furniture and technology are appearing.
Engineering colleges and departments are building and renovating facilities, spending millions to provide new classrooms, meeting spaces, and labs. What are the drivers for all the recent activity?
Growing Enrollments
One key factor for new construction and renovation is a simple equation:
engineering school + more engineering students = a need for more space
Enrollments are rising at institutions nationwide.
Leo Kempel, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Engineering, notes that enrollment at his school has expanded about 12% a year over the last five years. “There is a large trend toward engineering as a career interest in ways we haven’t seen 10–15 years ago,” he says. “That’s true if you talk to deans across the country.”
He attributes the growth to outreach efforts and the view among parents and students that engineering is a lucrative major. “People are looking at the ROI,” he explains. “They see an undergraduate education as an investment opportunity.”
Michigan State is responding to increased interest by expanding courses and research. The school has 170 engineering faculty and over the next five years could hire 100 more. Buildings, such as a new $61 million, 130,000-square-foot research facility scheduled to open in August 2015, will support the growth. It will bring together teams from the Colleges of Engineering, Human Medicine, and Natural Science to promote the development of bioengineering and engineering health sciences as well as student learning opportunities.
Meanwhile, Purdue University’s engineering school is in the third year of a five-year strategic growth initiative, in which it is increasing faculty by 30% to keep up with increases in both undergraduate and graduate enrollment. (See “Purdue Plans to Boost Hiring of Engineering Faculty,” December 2012 PE.)
Robert Frosch, P.E., associate dean of resource planning and management for the school’s College of Engineering, stresses that this is also a re-envisioning opportunity. “Growth can transform,” he says.
Purdue is approaching its rapid need for new space with three strategies: renovating, leasing, and constructing.
For instance, the oldest building in the College of Engineering, Grissom Hall, was built in 1902. It has now been completely gutted to open up interior hallways, move offices off windows to expand natural light, and restore 16-foot-tall ceilings.
Purdue is also taking inspiration from industry, following the lead of companies such as Google and Facebook to use strategies like “hot desking,” in which some work stations are not assigned but shared. Mobile graduate students can work at any station, and lockers provide personal storage space.
“We’re gaining 220% efficiency,” says Frosch, noting that 2.2 people can now fit where one person once did.
He explains that while the world has changed, many university buildings have remained the same. New construction isn’t always possible, so “we can either tear [facilities] down or reinvigorate them, make them usable for the next century.”
THE NEW BIOENGINEERING FACILITY AT MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY WILL SERVE AS A HUB FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH. THE BUILDING IS SCHEDULED FOR COMPLETION IN AUGUST 2015.Evolving Approaches
Changes in educational methods are also driving the need for new facilities. NSPE member Oktay Baysal, P.E., is dean of Old Dominion University’s College of Engineering and Technology. He believes that traditional buildings don’t respond well to the changes in engineering education, which are introducing teaching methods that go beyond talking heads in classrooms. ODU recently completed a new $17.8 million Engineering Systems Building, which brings together engineering laboratories from across campus along with offices and classrooms. The building focuses on project-based learning.
The dean explains that the new 51,000-square-foot facility decreased faculty office size by 30%–40% but increased the size of the interaction area, or “collaboratory.” For instance, desks allow 3D visualizations and are reorganizable, and glass walls can be written on and seen from both sides, as well as capture notes.
Like Purdue, ODU has drawn on industry concepts. “Someone said, ‘Did you get these ideas from Google?’” Baysal says. “Not the idea, but the interactivity.” He adds that ODU had been trying to incorporate new ways of teaching before the new facility was built, but the infrastructure wasn’t conducive.
New technologies in buildings are enabling collaborative approaches. Purdue has partnered with workplace furnishing company Steelcase to bring in its products designed to promote collaboration. The table with a monitor and connectivity enables students to share on a larger screen what’s on their individual laptops.
But Frosch points out that new strategies aren’t “one size fits all.” The school’s new 147,000-square-foot Wang Hall, a $39 million facility constructed for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and also used as “swing space” during renovations, includes an open environment with work cafes and mobile stations but also private spaces for “heads-down time” and various-sized rooms for meetings and conferences.
And new approaches are reaching research facilities as well. Michigan State’s Kempel explains that the open floor plan of the new biomedical facility will help enhance collaborative research and interdisciplinary teams. “It’s being designed to afford a venue for the collisions of ideas,” he says.
Developing Makers
Another trend driving new facilities is the “maker” culture, or the do-it-yourself technology movement. Schools are adding spaces to allow students to participate, such as Georgia Institute of Technology’s Invention Studio. As an article in the journal Advances in Engineering Education explains, the studio is a 3,000-square-foot “design-build-play” prototyping space originally launched for the school’s capstone design course. It has now “taken on a life and culture of its own.” In it, a thousand students per month meet, mentor each other, and create objects for courses and personal projects. More than 30 companies donated to build and support the facility. Equipment, valued at $1 million, includes 3D printers and laser cutters. The facility also incorporates a lounge as well as meeting, assembly, and testing spaces.
In September, the University of Central Florida launched a new $1 million complex of maker spaces designed to help students take their ideas from brainstorming and concept design to prototyping and manufacturing. Also supported by industry, the spaces comprise a gathering lab for meeting and project discussion; an idea lab for brainstorming with idea-generating technology; an innovation lab with 3D printers; and a manufacturing lab with heavy equipment.
And Michigan State just launched a space in an engineering residence hall where students can collaborate with business students on app ideas. It’s similar to a maker space, Kempel says, but designed around cybertechnology, with a model drawn from startup incubator facilities.
ROBOT PRESENTS SCISSORS FOR THE SEPTEMBER 2014 DEDICATION OF WANG HALL, CONSTRUCTED FOR PURDUE UNIVERSITY’S SCHOOL OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING.Greening Buildings
As schools build and renovate facilities, they are making them more energy efficient and sustainable. The renovations of Purdue’s Grissom Hall include switching to LED lighting, replacing air handling systems, and adding insulation. “We’re taking 100-year-old buildings [and asking], how can we set them to last for another 50–100 years?” says Frosch.
At Philadelphia University, the Design, Engineering, and Commerce Center was completed in 2012 as a collaboration centerpiece and is the place where the capstone courses for the College of Design, Engineering, and Commerce come together. The $20 million, 38,500-square-foot building includes flexible studios, seminar and meeting spaces, 3D printing facilities and prototyping lab, and a two-story forum space for exhibits and events. The DEC Center is certified Gold, the second highest rating, by the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.
Says J. Thomas Becker, P.E., the university’s associate vice president for operations and NSPE member, “Our facilities need to represent best management practices and are also becoming living-learning labs. We get held accountable for our operational protocols and carbon footprint.”
In 2013, St. Martin’s University, a Benedictine institution in Washington State, dedicated its Cebula Hall. It is a LEED Platinum-certified building, achieving the highest rating of any newly constructed building in the western hemisphere according to engineering dean and NSPE member Zella Kahn-Jetter, P.E.
The 26,000-square-foot building incorporates equipment that reduces water usage by almost half, a large roof-top solar panel system, and a rain garden, among other features. Kahn-Jetter explains that the school wanted Cebula Hall to teach environmental stewardship. It has been designed so its operating systems provide learning opportunities not just for students but also for faculty and visitors. Signs and displays teach about energy usage, conservation, efficiency, and respect for the environment, she says. “We are showing our students that they can be outstanding engineers and, at the same time, they can leave the world a better place.”
The $7.5 million facility cost $225 per square foot. This compares to an average of $275–$400 per square foot for non-LEED laboratory buildings on college campuses, says a representative from the project’s architectural firm.
CEBULA HALL AT ST. MARTIN’S UNIVERSITY SCORED 97 OUT OF A POSSIBLE 110 POINTS TO ACHIEVE ITS LEED PLATINUM RATING.Funding Projects
Schools are using a variety of methods to pay for new construction and renovations. Gift funds are a prominent piece. For example, the Grissom Hall renovation at Purdue is being funded largely through alumni donations.
But other models can play a role as well. Purdue’s Wang Hall was built through a public-private partnership. It is owned by the Purdue Research Foundation, a separate entity from the university that accepts gifts and administers trusts, with space leased to the university and to retail businesses.
The state of Michigan made a capital improvement investment at various institutions, and Michigan State had the opportunity to choose the project for the funds. According to Kempel, this made up half of the cost of the new bioengineering facility. While many worthy projects could have used the money, he believes “the straightforward decision for MSU administrators to make.”
But budgetary issues can sometimes interfere with projects. As a public institution, Old Dominion University’s capital projects are mostly funded by the state. “We are at the mercy of the state, and the state is at the mercy of the economy,” says Baysal.
Plans for ODU’s Engineering Systems Building began in 2007, but construction was delayed until 2011. In addition, the school requested three times the funds from the university that it ultimately received. That meant some design aspects were left on the chopping block.
The whole building was originally designed to be an experimental instrument, Baysal says, taking in measurements such as heat transfer. But that function was deemed nonessential in budget tightening, as was making the building four stories instead of two.
“We’re proud of what we did [with the reduced funds],” says the engineering dean. “We’re engineers; we always have a solution.” However, he would have preferred to do more.
Keeping Up
Is there competition among schools for the latest-and-greatest facilities? Some say yes and some say no.
“Of course we feel pressure to compete with other institutions,” says St. Martin’s Kahn-Jetter, “not just in terms of facilities but also in terms of enrollment and quality of programs.”
Thomas Mulinazzi, P.E., retired from the University of Kansas’s School of Engineering last August, where he had served as associate dean of engineering, among other roles. The engineering school has built five new buildings in the last 12 years, and the NSPE member believes there is a facilities “arms race” among institutions.
He attributes this to several factors. One is the need at public-funded institutions to bring in more money as state aid shrinks. Universities are depending on increased tuition and research overhead to pay the bills, Mulinazzi says, and deans are facing pressure to increase overhead returns. In addition, rankings are based on criteria including the amount of research dollars per faculty member. Those needs drive new facilities. Also, schools offer attractive startup packages—including new labs—to draw in faculty.
“I think it’s going to have to stop,” he says. “There is no way universities can keep paying this kind of stuff without having state aid increased.”
But others disagree with the concept of an arms race. “In terms of using space to draw talent, we all like new labs, new buildings,” says Kempel. “But it’s more of a question of having the infrastructure in place to realize the opportunities that the talent brings.”
Frosch concurs, explaining that Purdue wants to have spaces available to enable faculty success. Not every school needs to have every type of facility, he says, but he believes it’s good for the profession in general if institutions all build facilities to help produce more engineers.
Philadelphia University’s Becker notes that schools do learn from each other. Representatives from his university visited Harvard and MIT before the Design, Engineering, and Commerce Center was built in 2012, and then recently Harvard visited Philadelphia University to generate ideas for their new engineering campus. “We try to do it a little better, and then they visit us, and the next place does it even better,” Becker says.
But he says that, at least in his school’s case, it’s not about competing for bragging rights or having the newest building as much as “learning from each other to advance the profession overall, with all our students ultimately benefitting.”
THE NEW ENGINEERING SYSTEMS BUILDING AT OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY INCLUDES THIS COLLABORATORY, WHERE A GRADUATE STUDENT WORKS AT A 3D VISUALIZATION DESK.
LAIN JARAMILLO PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO / RRMM ARCHITECTS