Facilities Planning, Design, Construction
Learning How to Squeeze More Out of What You Already Have
College and university buildings are the most poorly utilized of any building type. Increased demand for space, either for additional students or additional programs, has traditionally been seen as a call for new construction designed to meet a specific need at a specific time, with little thought given to accommodating future change. Many colleges and universities justify this practice by benchmarking against one another. The problem with using inbred metrics is they ignore best practices and simply institutionalize poor utilization, inefficient schedules, and turf ownership. Campus planning became a discipline that focused on where to place new buildings, not what would trigger the need for the new building. When a master plan did try and justify growth, it was often simply an extrapolation of the status quo. Up until now this out-dated approach could persist, but this recession has slowed the money train and now colleges and universities must learn how to become efficient.
In the years following WWII, the University of Wisconsin System subscribed to the tradition of formula-based planning, but has subsequently evolved an issues-based approach to identifying space needs and pursuing construction projects. Increasingly as the master planning of 13 campuses, renovation of existing facilities, and programming of new buildings is undertaken, rigorous and defensible space needs assessments are relied upon. These form the basis for justifying and securing scarce funding and meeting our goals for sustainability. This is the optimal approach to achieving increased value of facilities.
|
|