(Sophie) Xiaofei Wu_ Future Campus_v2

Inclusivity, Flexibility, Adaptability

Students not only study in campus but also live in campus. At present, students keep traveling between where they live and where they study. Since highly mix-used building isn’t a new topic for contemporary architecture, how it would be like if a building were flexible and adjustable for both studying and living, including apartment, gym and library?

In Dom-Ino House, Le Corbusier firstly shows the example of “free plan” defined by the floor, column, and stairs. Forty years later, in S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas argues that the complexity generated by superimposition and combination of functions brings architecture opportunities to build new relations and interactions through reprograming. Adding to Le Corbusier’s “free plan”, Koolhaas are proposing a “free section,” in which interactions happen in all available space defined by the overall structure, horizontally but also vertically.

For future campus, the school building is not only of inclusivity to mix different programs, but also of flexibility and adaptability for the future changes and different needs coming from the users. On the basis of Corbusier’s “free plan” and koolhaas’s “free section”, I am proposing a “free space” that is of inclusivity but also flexibility and adaptability simultaneously, which allows horizontal and vertical interactions as well. 

Dealing with the conflict between permanence of architecture and the instability of demand, it is important to identify the permanent part and temporary part within a building. The less permanent part, the more temporary part, the more flexible and adaptable the building is. As Koolhaas mentioned, within a building, available space is defined by the overall structure. For “frees space,” the “overall structure” is the only permanent part while the left “available space” is for temporary occupying and open to change. Besides the overall structure, all the programs are temporary, which allows changing in their size, location, and form according to demand and time. It finally entails architects to reconsider the adjacency among these temporary programs and the relationship between programs and the “overall structure.”

However, what would be the “overall structure” for the compacted building? On one hand, the “overall structure” is no longer limited to the structure against gravity but also an infrastructural structure that realizes the connection and interaction between different programs. It leads students and faculty into different programs – learning space, administrating space, living space, sporting space and collaborate space - and allows them to travel between. It also contains the program that maintains the building’s operation – the vertical circulation, the equipment room, the waste and so on. Therefore, the “overall structure” works as service core that supports and maintains the building.

On the other hand, to allow changing in the temporary programs, the “overall structure” organizes these programs within a 3D grid that based on one module. Each program could enclose a certain number of unit spaces according to the needs. The spaces left could be landscape terrace as informal activity space, which could also be include to other program in case of possible changes. Also, the dormitories would be removable units that could install and remove based on the amount of people that live in the building.

DongfangXie_Abstract_V2

The Future Campus for Refugees

As is known to all that Europe has a refugee problem for years. Although there are many official refugee camps which provide food, housing, and medicine care, a large number of unauthorized camps still exist in the central cities and usually around the official camps or transport stations. According to the statistic report from DIE ZEIT in October, 2016, nearly 60% of Syrian refugees only have or under primary-school education level and only 10% of refugees can find a job. Education issue is urgent for refugees.

Building a centralized campus complex for them might be an executable solution. The prior mission of the campus is providing the fundamental accommodation for all students. Thus, besides the regular accessory buildings, the main buildings in the campus will be dormitories and dining halls. And considering it might be a long term problem, the campus should also include the kindergarten, primary school, middle school, and high school for the second generation of refugees. A student center and embassy are definitely necessary, which should be located in one building in the very center of the campus. Meanwhile, a train station in the center area is also needed, not only to transport food and necessities for refugees, but also to build up the connection between the campus and city to guarantee that the students can fully engage into the city activities. Skill training is the essential issue, however the career backgrounds of refugees are complex and diverse, it is unlikely to introduce professional devices and equipment for all kinds of subjects and establish labs and workshops with them. Therefore, sending students to the working places and practice their skills in internships would be an effective strategy, which makes it important to place the training building nearby the train station. Online education system allows volunteers and other universities or institutions participate in the teaching section, which requires the classroom with information devices. There will be three sizes of classrooms in the training building. The large ones function as the digital lecture room which can contain 200 to 300 students at once and hold job consultations, language classes, and local culture introduction. The middle size classrooms are the regular ones, 45 seats will be placed around the walls to leave the middle area empty, so that each room could has a holographic projection which shows the online transmissions. Classes with virtual reality equipment taking place in the small size room will pay more attention to the communication and coordination. No furniture will stand in the room and no device here has a cable, any decoration here would be considered unnecessary. Students here work as a group and get in touch with the companies, in which they can know the job content and get familiar with the operation process. To save more spaces and contain more people, each collective dormitory with a private bathroom is no more than 10 square meters, for the campus has already provided a various of basic public spaces. However, student has a family can apply a studio apartment which type would match the number of family members.

Shane P. Donnelly

March 29, 2017

Design Ecologies

Campus of the Future

This year the University of Michigan celebrates its bicentennial as one of the world’s leading university’s in all spheres of education, research, and ideas. The question is what will the next two hundred years have in store for this global institution, what will the campus of that future look like, how can it be designed and planned for the coming generations. As we continue along a path of global connectivity and a one world system brought about via the interchanging of ideas, technologies, and communication; the University of Michigan campus needs to reflect these forces that are altering the world around us. Buildings on campus must learn to integrate into this interconnected global web and be in conversation with one another. These ideologies should be seen in the way the university organizes its future buildings and spaces. Buildings need to allow positive gatherings of people. Programs should not be divided but instead speak with one another, forming a dialogue and interconnectedness like the way people are now.  Conversational promoting seating areas, comfortable spaces, lots of natural light, and the encouragement of nature from the outdoors in, all are ways to promote a better-connected campus. With interconnected programs, it allows mix used activities to occur and buildings to have a more 24/7 usage of their spaces. This in turn encourages conversation and people to gather, exchange ideas and thoughts, like how social media brings different peoples, ideas, and conceptions together, so can mixed use buildings. Programs that could be folded into academic and residential buildings on campus are places of food, drink, and entertainment. For example, why not have a music and libations bar inside of a dormitory, where the bar is open not only to students but the public as well. Strangers should not be perceived as a threat, but instead welcomed. It is not dissimilar to people who meet online, but instead going back to a more traditional method of in person. Students can meet people who may be locals or from another dormitory, and thus grow in their relations with others. Mixing program like this in turn creates safer and more comfortable spaces for people to be in, thus enticing more people to use the space. It is safer because people are using the space and surround area of the building always of day, this discourages criminal acts since more people are watching the streets and structures. In fact, just a few people mingling outside can turn an otherwise unsafe and empty street into one more comfortable and easy to walk along late at night, all this through people being in a space or structure due to mixed programing. Another way social interactions can be heightened is through better connections across campus. Whether it is through shortened wait time at intersections, new sidewalks, bike lanes, healthier paths between buildings, and an overall reworking of how people experience buildings and the campus through movement. Mixing transportation together has another added benefit of cutting costs, emissions, and travel times. Faster connections mean more movement, and more movement means more activity in the public sphere to the university. Thus mixing programs and spaces creates a healthier, safe, and livelier university. 

Abhiram Sharma_Campus of the Future_Abstract

The American Campus began in 1817 with Thomas Jefferson creating what he described as an “academic village”. It was in the same year that the University of Michigan was established. An insightful comment that must be mentioned here is by John Davis Pierce, Michigan’s first superintendent of public schools, who is recorded to have said, “that a University did not consist in buildings, but in the number and ability of its Professors, and in its other appointments…” (Hinsdale, 1906) It is worth reminding ourselves that the primary purpose of a university is to serve as a community of teachers and scholars. Seen as an ‘academic village’, it is only as good as its villagers.

In order to boost the spirit of community amongst its inhabitants, a University would benefit by promoting the sense of ownership felt towards its built environment. It is natural human instinct to customize the space inhabited. It can be seen in the subtle act of turning a chair before sitting on it, even when the chair is perfectly placed. And it is also evidenced in the more elaborate arrangements of furniture, food, and festivals, which one brings with them into the space they occupy. However monkish its subjects, they are a diverse group spanning people of different age-groups, races, nationalities, and most importantly—fields of study. The people must be given the ability to customize their surroundings, and develop a sense of community and belonging.

This proposal presents a solution for the use of campus infrastructure to serve as a second layer of personalization and information. With the help of projection technologies, the University could adapt its building facades to provide torrents of information, and personalized content by virtue of having a wide canvas that lights up in the evenings. Allowing users the freedom to control the content gives them agency in influencing the dynamic look of the campus.

The University’s buildings have much to make up for. Even if one were to look back a hundred years ago, one would find a similar sentiment echoed in the Michigan Alumnus, from 1921, which reads:

It must be acknowledged that whatever Michigan may boast in the university world, architectural distinction has not been her strongest point. We have many useful buildings and a few that are beautiful as well, but we need more that are both. The two requirements are by no means antagonistic. … Michigan has a marvelous opportunity to change, almost overnight, its whole architectural setting. (Mayer, 2015)

It is time to take the University a step further. To give it a setting it rightfully deserves. The American University must live up to the quality described by Le Corbusier, of being akin to a temporary paradise, a world in itself. (Le Corbusier, 1964)


Works Cited

Hinsdale, B. A. (1906). History of the University of Michigan, with biographical sketches of regents and members of the University Senate from 1837 to 1906. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Le Corbusier. (1964). When the Cathedrals Were White. McGraw-Hill.

Mayer, F. W. (2015). A Setting for Excellence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

DongfangXie_Abstract

Reformations in architecture area have always followed the breakthroughs in technology. Future technologies like controllable nuclear fusion, room temperature superconductor, graphene, quantum computer, and so on, which are so potential to change the society structure and so close to the present. To illustrate the university in the future, technologies bond with education and architecture would be the prior factors to be considered.

Unlike the education in middle school or primary school, managing and supervising students are not the business for university. During the recent years, the progress in Internet has made online education come true. In the most cases, learning is a process which mainly involves the perception of vision and auditory. With a terminal display - a computer, a paid, or a cellphone - almost anyone can reach the education resources from the best universities, in which the teaching activities can be actually unsoldered from a certain classroom. The boom of virtual reality industry also gives us a hope that the online education can include much more subjects in. Maybe the naked-eye augmented reality will come true in couple of years. When quantum computer fully participates in Digital Evolution, the high quality rendering of virtual scene full with details would be a regular civilian technology and looks no different from the reality. Therefore, for the most faculties in the future, like literature, economy, or information, classroom will be no longer necessary, lecture room and physical library may disappear. A bedroom, a living room, even a subway carriage with the equipment can be a space to learn or teach. The capacity of class will be incredibly increased while the cost of education will be reduced, which finally leads the campus achieve the top of accessibility.

As a result, the size of the campus will be shrunk a lot and a single building will be able to contain a dozen faculties. The public space where people have discussions will be declined as well. For the STEM faculties, laboratories will occupy the most area of the building. Meanwhile, with the help of remote-controlled robots, there would be no people working in the labs except mechanicians. Maybe only the faculties which are involved in the national security or state secrets will still hold the traditional way in teaching, learning, and research. The most students and teachers don’t need to stay and live in the campus for all the time, unless there is a special occasion requires people to meet in person. Perhaps they can also enroll in different universities at the same time but still study in one subject. The boundary of university will be blurred. The mobility of people who study or work in the university will be more flexible than ever, and cooperation will be the most important relationship between the universities. Thus, the transportation center will be combined tightly with the colleges, not only for exchanging people, but also for transporting lab devices and materials.

However, some big public buildings like “Big House” might be maintained as the places to celebrate some specific traditional activities which are deeply rooted in the culture of the campus. 

Yameng(Nancy) Zhang_Abstract

Over the border

Paraisopolis is one of the most developed informal settlements in the city of Sao Paulo. As named by "Fevela" in Brazil, the place is originally dominated by a group of people who self-constructed their homes in this area, and right now is developed with proper basic infrastructure, such as school, church, hospitals and a sense of community. However, Paraisopolis as a Fevela is still isolated with the outside community, due to many reasons, including the low income group is next to high income communities. There is obvious physical divisions on the border.The existing condition of the site is surrounded by highways and fences which create physical boundaries in Paraisopolis. Without any branching and connecting to outside land in the south border, the isolation almost represent its situation in the city.

During my research and field trip to Sao Paulo, I identified one potential opportunity that can alter this situation, which is referring to the city’s future planning of Metro line 18 that has two stops in and near Paraisopolis. Therefore, I want to take advantages of metro stations as transit area with moving populations from inside and outside communities use the station everyday. The project is aiming at bridging the area with the outside city.

Current situation of Paraisopolis requires designers to understand this place comprehensively, designing infrastructure in a different and transdisiplinary way, create multifunctional and multi-scalar programs to encourage collaboration,interactions; possibly think about income-generating ways and promote healthy life style. In order to achieve those purposes, the station will serves not only a transportation hub but also a hub that encourages physical health and cultural(mental) activities.  One proposed solution to transform the premeiter of Paraisopolis by creating a loop of recreational path and other space for sports that welcome citizens to use. Functioned together with other elements, an outdoor amphitherater that can hold concert and filming activities during events and festival and serves as casual meeting and seatings during everyday time. Other activity space along the street will have furnitures and small structures can be arranged by users. During the weekend it will turns into a place for street festival and market that celebrate the fever culture, including residents and small group show off their trading products. The architecture itself features a heavy top overhang and open lot in the ground floor designed with a park or garden environment, that enables all of those casual activities happens in certain days. The rest of desired programs may incorporate a series of cultural activities, such as open-air museum, outdoor educational space, a small community vertical farm. Open space on the ground will be designed to encourage outdoor engagement, for example, recreational activities. Inside the station, retail possibilities for restaurants and cafes will become connections between cultural and recreational use of the building. In order to promote the cultural-exchange activities and increase the interaction of two groups, the goal of the project is to promote sustainable living in both Paraisopolis and rest of formal neighborhoods..

ALLISON FORD_Campus of the Future_Abstract

The current paradigm of the university campus is long overdue for an evolutionary pivot. This year marks the bicentennial anniversary of our incredibly prolific and fiercely proud University of Michigan, and as we as students and faculty alike celebrate 200 years of excellence in education together across our many majors and backgrounds, it seems a significant time to not just appreciate, but also to innovate. In past centuries university campuses have followed a certain formulaic map, albeit for perfectly valid reasons, in regards to their design processes and urban surroundings. However, with global and educated populations continuing to rise, and availability of sites and resources growing ever scarcer, perhaps it is time for universities to expand their definition of what it is to be “on campus.” That is not to say that the historic, architectural, and cultural relevancies of the university should be disregarded, nor should these importances be overlooked or minimized in the name of modernity. Thus, if it is the societal implications and the recognizable, historic facades and landscapes we seek to retain, then it is time we turn our sights inward, rather than attempting to spread and build further outward. The question then becomes how can we redesign the contemporary campus such that these spaces and how they are used become conduits through which we may facilitate learning and teaching for students and faculties of a subsequent era? Fortunately, modern technological advancements have made this concept progressively easier to instate, and exponential growth rates imply increasingly more affordable options. This project outlines a number of feasible technological installations that can aid in the University of Michigan’s transition into a true campus of the future, and compares results from other campuses that have already implemented such devices. These technologies, in conjunction with a series of additional design measures I will outline, are analyzed according to their academic applicability, cross-campus universality, interface accessibility, longevity, adaptability, and profitability and cost projections in order to determine their potential applications, benefits, and detriments to the university campus.  The analyses will be conducted primarily on three different scales including rooms, buildings, the campus as a whole, though considerations of a larger scale, which includes surrounding geological, historical, architectural, and sociocultural, will be discussed as well. The significant scalar variation is admittedly unorthodox, however I believe a broad lens is necessary to view the numerous interconnecting complexities that comprise the university campus, and narrowing one’s focus to isolated design strategies will yield limited and incomplete results. It is for this reason I propose that simply updating our technology is not in itself a solution to our ongoing issue of spatial limitations, but that other measures, such as sustainable design, adaptive reuse, interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-use shared spaces, and implementation of existing conditions are also key components to forging a successful and sustainable path into the future of Michigan.

sdonnelly_campusofthefuture

Shane P. Donnelly

March 13, 2017

Design Ecologies

Campus of the Future

This year the University of Michigan celebrates its bicentennial as one of the world’s leading university’s in all spheres of education, research, and ideas. The question is what will the next two hundred years have in store for this global institution, what will the campus of that future look like, how can it be designed and planned for the coming generations. As we continue along a path of global connectivity and a one world system brought about via the interchanging of ideas, technologies, and communication; the University of Michigan campus needs to reflect these forces that are altering the world around us. Buildings on campus must learn to integrate into this interconnected global web and be in conversation with one another. This can be achieved in several ways which include the built environment, connected technologies, and design that inhibits social and ideological interactions.  Within the built environment, buildings can reflect interconnectedness through the ways in which typologies are mixed. By placing mixed use structures, classrooms within dormitories next to a bar on top of a theatre, you create conditions where a building is never left empty or unused at any given time throughout the day. This allows for continuous activity and thus increases the interactions and connectivity of people, encouraging conversation and exchanges of ideas. This type of construction also enhances safety as it promotes twenty-four hour usages of the space and the policing of it via the presence of people. The twenty-first century has been dominated by hand held devices, the freedom of information via the internet, leaps in technological innovation, and thus the most interconnected and globally communitive generation yet. Buildings need to embrace a similar globalized and interconnected network. One way buildings can share information to better the campus is through knowing the environmental conditions in each space. By knowing when one building needs more energy as compared to another, that first building, if it is not being as heavily used, can shut down systems to divert the extra energy needed for that second building. This allows for a cohesive and responsive systems network where the campus can manage energy in a sustainable and connected way. This also can expand into social interactions, where internet connectivity can be increased or decreased dependent on the number of people in a certain location. This will boost that large group of people’s ability to become more connected to the world. Not only should the built environment increase the way people connect online, but also in person. Buildings need to allow positive gatherings of people. Seating areas, comfortable spaces, lots of natural light, and the encouragement of nature from the outdoors in. Another way social interactions can be heightened is through better connections across campus. Whether it is through shortened wait time at intersections, new sidewalks, bike lanes, healthier paths between buildings, and an overall reworking of how people experience buildings and the campus through movement. 

(Sophie)Xiaofei Wu_Compacted Building for Future Campus

Students not only study in campus but also live in campus. At present, the buildings on campus are either for studying or for living. Students keep traveling between where they live and where they live. But, how it would be like if a building is for both studying and living? How it would be like if the building for school is combined with apartment, gym and library?

In Marseilles Unite Habitation, Le Corbusier firstly combined living with different service functions, adding shops and public facilities to the apartment building. With shops, restaurant, pharmacy, barber, and laundry, the building itself is like a small city, where people could meets their basic needs without going outside. Here, Le Corbusier shows the example of multi-functional living apartment. Forty years later, in S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas argues that the complexity generated by superimposition and combination of functions brings architecture opportunities to build new relations and interactions through reprograming. “… what matters is the structure of the building and the position of the vertical communication shaft. Overall structure on one hand, and position of stairwell and elevator shaft on the other, define the available space.” Interactions happen in all available space defined by the overall structure. Adding to Le Corbusier’s “free plan”, Koolhaas are proposing a “free section,” in which interactions happen horizontally but also vertically.

For future campus, buildings are no longer occupied by one single function. Teaching, living, learning and exercising, multiple programs will be compacted into one building on the basis of Corbusier’s free plan and koolhaas’s free section, which brings the interaction between living and studying, and providing a new lifestyle for students.

As Koolhaas mentioned, within a building, “available space” is defined by the “overall structure”. To compact multiple programs into one single building, it entails architects to reconsider the adjacency among these programs and the relationship between programs and the “overall structure.” Here are two points. On the one hand, the “overall structure” is no longer limited to the structure against gravity but also an infrastructural structure that realizes the connection and interaction between different programs. On the other hand, this compactness has to allow flexibilities that enable the building to resist to the change of students’ and faculty’s needs according to different time. It has to adapt to these changes.

XIA Wei_Campus of the Future_Abstract

The proposal is to build a “wall” across the Michigan Union on the campus of University of Michigan. It starts from the northeast corner of the Michigan Union, diagonally goes through the building, and finally arrive at the biggest courtyard. The “wall” is constituted by two layers of perforated metal plates which are higher than the main building. The new construction generates a long and narrow exterior space to become a liner entrance to link the green space, the building and the courtyard.

The two perforated plates have uniform square apertures, ten feet by ten feet, which allows light and sight go through. The apertures on one plate shift from the ones on another plate, so that the “wall” has a solid elevation. The plates are coated with mirror paint on both sides (or made by aluminum or stainless steel), and the exterior surface is designed with concave panels. This mirror design creates an overlapping façade of projections of views behind the both sides of the “wall”, as well as the views in its interval.

Instead of the original entrance, the northeast origin of the “wall” becomes a new entrance of the Michigan Union. Two pieces of plates constitute a long passage in the open green space, surrounded with lots of trees. Because the trees are fragmented and reflected on the mirror wall, it creates an illusion that the wall disappears in its context, by mixing the green elements both in the mirror and in the real. The square openings give an opportunity that people can walk across between the mirrors, appearing and disappearing in the mirrors and real world.

This visional scene turns into a transformation of the building façade and the green fragments, when the “wall” closely touches the building corner. It cuts the entire building into two parts, precisely and illegibly. It becomes a new façade of the building, and square apertures are filled with glass curtain walls. From both sides, people can see each other in the window or on the exterior mirror wall. The “wall” generates a connected separation, or a detached connection in this gap.

At the point where the “wall” cross the smaller courtyard, it absorbs the architectural elements from the courtyard, which are a beautiful red brick façade and a spatial depth. The wall creates a new façade with another cracked courtyard inside. The flatness of the wall includes a three-dimensional information. The strategy of the overlapping façade is either a compound of architectural elements or even an implication about interdiscipline, mixed culture and containment of the university.

Finally, the “wall” leads people to the biggest courtyard in the middle of the Michigan Union, which makes the public facility truly public. The “wall” is a bond or a blood vessel to get through the building form exterior to interior. Just like Professor Sandra Manninger said, “a wall usually creates separation, but here the “wall” gather everything together.”

Diana Fang_Campus of the Future

IMMERSION

The campus framework must always be an incubator for relational human narratives foremost, while accommodating the potential for present and future devices and objects as augmenters of experience within the modern age. We shouldn’t loosen our hold on the physical realm as particularly meaningful and containing unrealized configurations for happiness and inspiration. The key to successful spatial reasoning is the interface of sensory needs and desires through nuanced building prototypes Can a studio be full of textured walls instead of desks? What is the role of furniture? Should rooms exist as is or tend toward nebulous pods and cavernous wombs? This proposal for a new campus begins with surface prototypes for each scale of experience, ranging from surface to object, from room to building..

A major shortcoming of contemporary design is a lack of unification between business-minded design economy and client-centered comfort and actualization. Disparate components, overseen by individual designers and engineers, do not always collude into an immersive final experience, because the formal process compromises its own cohesion in the process of value engineering or other problem-solving biases. The aim for this project is to bring a wealth of character and idiosyncrasy back into space; to reconsider the comforts that have slipped from consideration and to color the academic surroundings with topographic devices that will foster more humanistic learning. Beginning with topological schemes found in nature, we can design a surface, a piece of furniture, a space, and finally an overarching network, through repetition of formal gesture with increasing scale.

Two formal typologies are being investigated in this proposal: flowing/linear forms such as canyon striations and bulbous forms such as balloons, are of particular interest in this proposal. The crispness of former brings about a sense of psychological clarity and flow, while the softness of the latter facilitates womb-like warmth and enclosure. These two simple forms can easily replace bulky, complicated objects within a room, and can be formed into the structures. Chair surfaces can be the interior of a sphere. Desks can be notches cut from striated rock, which the walls within a room are formed from. Expanding into circulation, flowing tunnels leading into bulbous pods create the perfect dynamic of journey and arrival. At the larger scaled spaces, the typologies must manifest more in the overall shape of the space, with specific purposes available for interior elements as well, though not overbearing.

There are psychological investigations afloat within this project, particularly for younger students who are integrating the sensory experiences of their everyday environments and interactions into their evolving worldview and emotional palette. The linear, disjunct, banal shape of current campus spaces begs the question of how classrooms, lecture halls, and other spaces can be improved for the individual narrative, and stretching the imagination may be a critical tactic through which answers may be derived - designing organic spaces for our anthropic needs, inviting biomimicry as a technique is an exploration into comfort and desire.  Instead of fascist cages and corridors, we can better network the passages traveled through many distinct spaces as directional, exhaling, lively organs that exist with intention, forming a narrative trajectory for the passengers of our reality.

Yet fully realized devices of the future are game for integration into a speculative physical space - with added topologies comes the potential for new orientations of technologies and interfaces. Given that infrastructure is meant to house the tools of our time, the meaning of a room or a building toward its devices is to act as portals of augmentation into the human experience itself. Thus, the gateway between the physical and the digital realm must be a perfect formal liaison, as suggested by these topological reworkings of contemporary building.

Sophie Huan Ni_Campus of the Future_Abstract

Adaptation

Huan (Sophie) Ni

Campus of the Future

Henri Bergson wrote in his book Creative Evolution in 1907: ”There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up pf the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.”

The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.

As an architecture student in University of Michigan, we have different design projects with diverse uses. However, we never think about how to engage the room, building, campus we study at with emerging technology. Classroom is where students study, learn and live. Every student with different majors have different desires for the space they work and study. To be more specific, for architecture students, we spend most of our time in studio and each of us needs private and quite space to design but also a space to us to get together and to learn from each other. University of Michigan is accepting increasing number of students every year and Architecture department is not an exception. In the studio, there is almost no partitions and hundreds of students are studying at the same big space. Circumstances are changing, the room for students to study should change too.  Thus, getting to know what students from each major need is the most crucial and urgent thing to do for reinventing the room for the campus future. After knowing the needs for students, go back to the meaning of duration – invention, creation of forms and absolutely new. The room should constantly change to adapt to the shifting needs for students.

Learning is not only limit to students’ own major. To know what students in other majors are doing is also very important. Campus is a whole. Students should not be separated by majors or by buildings. All the buildings and the activities in the buildings should collaborate.  As a result, designing an exhibition space for all students to come and gather may let them get more collaborate with other. In addition, each building can have a shared space for students from other majors to come and share the facilities there. Moreover, more diverse facilities in one building is also crucial. Library may not be a single building. It can be divided and be put into each building. Then, students will have a chance to go to other students’ building. Thus, it gives opportunities for students to get to know each other and make the campus as a whole.

Just as Bergson indicates in his book: the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. Everything is constantly changing, so we need to always adapt to the present circumstances and always not afraid to be innovative and to create something absolutely new.

William Kenney_Future Campus_Abstract

A college performs and is perceived by the campus appearance, walkability, green spaces, and the type of buildings they provide and the classrooms inside. These are all vital aspects that contribute to the effectiveness and atmosphere of a university. With the world viewing college with higher value and importance than ever before, there is a need to hone in and focus on what ways we can enhance the experience of the student and prepare them for a job and career after they earn their degree. Colleges all around the world all appear the same aesthetically and function similarly. Is this the best and most effective form or should this be changed for the future?

Companies such as Google and Facebook are recreating this college “campus” atmosphere for the work setting. These technology companies are always looking towards the future, and the way they are developing their new offices is replicating the way a college performs. If this is effective, then we may want to take note that colleges have the right idea. Even housing projects seem to be taking this idea of a campus to enhance the way people live their life. The college campus appears to be the model of the future even though it has been around for centuries.

The question of how the campus of the future will perform doesn’t lay within the campus itself or the buildings or classrooms. It derives from how the students collaborate with each other and how schools within the college integrate with one another. There is a tendency for students to stay in the one building they belong to and interact with the students in their own college. Students do venture out, but the action of learning about different subjects isn’t always necessarily applied. By learning about other topics that vary from one’s major, students can expand their viewpoints and apply it to their own projects.

Even though majors may appear different, most are connected. Subjects such as architecture and psychology share certain qualities and can be studied through the lens of the other, even though the main focus differs. When you only focus on one field, you may miss ideas that you could otherwise find. For example, the principles of psychology can be applied when designing a building to maximize its effectiveness and functionality. It is important for students to collaborate and learn about each other’s majors and apply these ideas to our own. We don’t need to change the structure of the campus, but the attitude and interactions of students. This can be done by holding classes of various majors in the same buildings, as well as adding requirements or holding events to motivate students to look outside of their major and expand their knowledge.