Figure 1 shows the Campus in 1930.
In 1933, The University of Texas once again sought an outstanding architect to produce a "comprehensive development plan" for the campus. Paul Cret of Philadelphia was selected and produced a master plan which guided campus building for twenty years. Paul Cret extended the Gilbert Plan, organized future buildings around quadrangles and malls, and contributed to the design of several buildings including the University Tower, The Union, and Mary Gearing Hall. Figure 2 shows the Cret Plan. Again, the buildings which resulted from this effort have served The University productively and have, along with buildings built under the Cass Gilbert plan, created a coherent core environment which has been crucial in shaping the character of The University of Texas as an institution. There is no one who can come to this campus and not feel the impact of the careful well scaled design that was left by Cret. For contrast Figure 3 shows the current status of the campus.
In the period following the Second World War, the campus was dominated by temporary buildings that provided a quick solution to its rapid growth. As we added more permanent buildings, we began to diverge from the guidelines of the Cret Plan. Although some buildings as late as the addition to Welch Hall in the 1980's were influenced by his plan, the expansion of the campus to its present form was done expediently, providing square footage to meet pressing space demands due to rapid growth. Most of this growth did not benefit from careful planning. While these buildings have served the basic needs to accommodate increased growth in students, faculty and staff, there is a general feeling that the result has been an unnecessarily fragmented campus, both functionally and aesthetically. There is a strong resolve to improve upon the campus character that has been developed over the last 30 years.
This master planning process is a first step toward recapturing the environmental and architectural quality which was established so beautifully at Campus Master Planning Committee chaired by Austin Gleeson, Chair of the Faculty Building Advisory Committee. Its fourteen members include faculty, staff, administration and student representatives as well as personnel from the UT System Office of Facilities, Planning and Construction. The committee was charged with formulating a framework for the commissioning of a campus master plan.
During the fall of 1993, the committee reviewed master planning processes at a number of peer institutions, reviewed current institutional activities concerning land use and construction on the UT campus, discussed various potential master planning strategies, and identified the primary issues which the campus master plan should address. Concurrent with these activities, the Faculty Building Advisory Committee has been interviewing representatives from the various schools and colleges on campus to ascertain future space needs and to determine priorities for future building projects.
The Campus Master Planning Committee has, from its discussions, ascertained ten issues which should guide the new Campus Master Plan:
1. Academic Community
It should be a primary goal of the campus master plan to promote interaction and community. Campus Master Planning Committee has, from its discussions, articulated planning guidelines for the new Campus Master Plan. The basic premise of these assumptions is that we have identified our basic mission and general size. These are that Campus Master Planning Committee distributed a "Request For Qualifications" to over 150 architects and city planners. There were 19 responses from teams of firms from the entire country. The best firms in the country were represented. The Committee selected five firms for interviews and finally provided President Berdahl with a rank ordered list of teams for consideration.
The University has now begun work on an architectural master plan for the campus. The New Haven, Conn., firm of Cesar Pelli & Associates has been appointed the project architect. The team includes Balmori Associates, Landscape Architects, also of New Haven, Travers and Associates, Transportation, of Clifton, New Jersey, and the local team of Danze and Blood.
Another Master Planning Committee with an even broader representation has been appointed again under the Chairmanship of Austin Gleeson and is acting as client representative during the master planning process.
The plan will take about 14 months to complete and has begun to address the issues outlined above: facilitation of academic community, extension of the core campus, organization of the campus, pedestrian, bicycle and vehicular circulation, adjacent neighborhoods, expansion, infrastructure, visual character and historical importance, as well as orientation and way finding facilitation. The plan will be a comprehensive look at the entire campus, with regard for present and future needs as well as campus tradition.
In early December 1994, we completed the first stage of the planning process, the information gathering stage, and we initiated the conceptual alternatives stage. During the information gathering stage, the planners made detailed studies of the programmatic needs of the campus and the facility's infrastructure such as service support and utilities. Major questions such as student and faculty transportation both on and to campus were examined. From these studies, the planners were able to begin to identify new opportunities that would allow us to address the questions raised in the Request for Qualifications about academic community or the ability to extend the Cret aesthetic into the entire campus. These proposals provide the basis for the work of the conceptual alternatives stage.
In addition, at the start of the plan, there were several projects that were in the advanced stages of design or on such a rapid development schedule that they could not easily fit into a systematic planning process. These included projects such as the Law School Advocacy and Dispute Resolution Center, the Interscholastic League Building and the Women's Softball Field. This set of projects was given a careful and separate review by the planning team and a set of recommendations about how these projects would best fit into a general campus plan were developed. These recommendations have now been delivered to the ad hoc building committees and the project architects for each of these projects so that work on them can continue.
You can help us. The Campus Master Planning Committee seeks the advice of members of the campus community: students, faculty, staff, visitors, and neighbors. Please consider filling out a questionnaire that the Committee will use to provide information to the architects. Your response to the questions and any other observations you wish to make about the campus will be of considerable value. This questionnaire is accessible directly through the Web with a forms-supportable browser (if your browser does not support forms, your may print out the questions and send your ideas to Austin Gleeson.)
There is also a mail server for anyone who wishes to discuss these issues. You can join by sending the command "subscribe campus_planning" in the body of an e-mail message to mailserv@physics.utexas.edu. You can send messages to this list server at campus_planning@physics.utexas.edu.
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