Preserving history while keeping up with innovation can be difficult for any institution—particularly when dealing with the infrastructure of a historic college campus in an era of rapid advancement in building technology. It’s a circumstance being faced by universities around the world, and with its new East End Transformation, Washington University in St. Louis is taking on the challenge of reinvigorating 20% of its campus, while addressing sustainability across the board.
Construction on the midtown campus started in 1900, and since that time, the school has continued to build within the framework of two original master plans: an 1895 landscape-based scheme by Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, and an 1899 block configuration by Philadelphia’s Cope and Stewardson. Both plans left room for interpretation, envisioning the east end of campus as a green space, without buildings. In Cope and Stewardson’s plan, which was built out, an allée of oak trees leads from Collegiate Gothic historic core to the far eastern edge of campus.
Making Sense of the East End
Necessity drives expansion, and as the demand for facilities grew, the East End became a clearinghouse of seemingly ad hoc, though by no means insignificant, construction. Between the two World Wars, local firm Jamieson & Spearl lined the south edge of the area with two buildings in an anomalous Stripped Classical style—the architecture school, Givens Hall, and the art school, Bixby Hall—leaving a gap between them for a museum that a young faculty member, Fumihiko Maki, Hon. FAIA, filled with the Modernist Steinberg Hall (1960). Maki returned decades later, a Pritzker Prize laureate, to expand the arts complex—now home of the consolidated Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts—with the Kemper Art Museum and Walker Hall (both 2006). On the north side of the allée, Boston-based Shepley Bulfinch designed Whitaker Hall (2003) for the biomedical engineering program, and RMJM designed two other engineering buildings, Brauer Hall (2010) and Green Hall (2011)—all three of which recall Cope and Stewardson’s original Collegiate Gothic.
The remaining open space was a giant parking lot. The problem with this arrangement was that the East End is the university’s formal entrance, and it faces the 1,300-acre public amenity of Forest Park. The setup served as “a barrier, a no man’s land,” between the school and the city, says associate vice chancellor and university architect James Kolker, FAIA. “It was one of the few places on campus where cars went all the way through, and it was disconnected. Anything we can do to bring Forest Park into our campus makes the East End a connector rather than a barrier.”
A Sustainable Future
Parallel to the creation of a new master plan for the East End, the university was in the throes of a second planning process: In 2010, it announced its intention to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Why 1990? “The most important reason is because it is the first year we had reliable data,” says Henry Webber, executive vice chancellor and chief administrative officer of the university. “One wants to be aggressive, but we also want to set goals that can be met with current technology,” as it was in 2010. “We’re into the ‘Show Me State’ piece,” he says, referencing the unofficial Missouri state motto, “which is we want to be sure we can achieve those [goals]. If we stretch we think we can get there.”
Throughout campus, energy improvements were made to existing buildings using data from extensive metering and monitoring. “It was a hard sell because it was very expensive to meter by individual floors of every building on campus,” Webber says. But the investment has paid off because “you can start looking at things like: Why are we using twice as much energy on floor four of this building rather than floor two? Sometimes there’s a good reason, but sometimes it turns out that it’s because of an efficiency problem.”
Metering allowed the university to make incremental improvements to existing building performance, but more-efficient new construction also brought real gains—and the university has doubled its square footage in the same decade it has been making GHG reductions, Webber says. “As a large institution with relatively large resources and capital, when we do a building, we have the ability to say: ‘What are the costs over 30 years?’ and ‘If I spend 5% more now, am I going to be better off over the long run?’ ” Webber says. “And we’re building buildings for the very long-term. We expect them to be permanent objects.”
Re-Greening Through Parking
The university tasked Alexandria, Va.–based Michael Vergason Landscape Architects with developing a master plan for the East End, centered on a new quad, Tisch Park. The first thing that had to go was the surface parking, which consumed most of the remaining historic green space. Kansas City, Mo.–based BNIM and Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake were tapped to create a two-level underground garage that could handle not only parked cars, but also traffic circulation. “When we took away the roads, the buses needed a place to go,” BNIM director of design Steve McDowell, FAIA, says. So the garage incorporates a bus hub and pedestrian pathways to the rest of the site. Keeping building permanence—and embodied carbon—in mind, the team designed the garage with enough structure and services to support adaptive reuse down the line. In a future with fewer cars, the ample natural light from skylights, punched entrances, and grade changes will serve enclosed classrooms or labs. It is something the firm has considered before, “but this is the first project we’ve actually followed through 100%,” McDowell says.
Submerging the parking reclaimed the ground plane for Tisch Park. Vergason revived the allée of oaks (nearly half of which were damaged or dying), with more than 30 tree species, most native to the region, while still framing a view of Brookings Hall, Cope and Stewardson’s turreted centerpiece. Vergason’s plan included space for five new buildings and one building expansion. Rain gardens help with on-site stormwater management, and the landscape architects designed seating areas for rest, study, and socializing with close attention to human scale and visual connections.
The landscape work involved extensive regrading that better aligns existing and new floor plates with the landscape. “Everything we built worked to that datum, and brought the landscape up to meet it, to create a quad that has a real sense of place,” Vergason says. “The buildings belong. It allows them to contribute to very active edges that are alive and transparent.”
Bridging the Style Gap
To create connections to the Cope and Stewardson campus core, the buildings flanking the northern edge of the new green are transitional in style. Jubel Hall, designed by Santa Monica, Calif.–based Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners with local firm Mackey Mitchell Architects for the Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science department, is a three-story lab with brick elevations, punched windows, and stone detailing that hearken back to the Collegiate Gothic, while still operating with 21st-century efficiency. The building is targeting LEED Gold—Silver is the minimum requirement for new construction on campus—minimizing energy usage in part by bringing daylight deep into the floor plates. “Our aspirations are to take a broadly holistic and humanistic approach to high-performing buildings, to think about how that can support day-to-day quality of life,” says partner Buzz Yudell, FAIA. Jubel Hall will be joined in 2021 by a second transitionally styled building on the northern edge of the park, McKelvey, Sr. Hall, designed by Washington, D.C.–based Perkins Eastman.
A More Inviting Future
“We completed a student experience plan”—an effort led by Phoenix-based Studio Ma—“to hear from the students what their priorities and challenges are on our campus. And frankly, the stone castles don’t make everybody feel welcome,” Kolker says, referring to the old Collegiate Gothic style. “First-year students that know nothing about architecture reach the conclusion that ‘I don’t feel comfortable walking into building X because I feel like it excludes, limits, and hides.’ Our campus is somewhat formal. We try to break that down at the East End, and we’re learning from it.”
Part of that new informality is seen in the landscape, and in the social spaces within Jubel Hall and other transitional-style buildings. With the rest of the new buildings, along the west and south sides of Tisch Park, the desire to evoke informality and transparency is more literal. Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake designed four structures that trade punched windows and masonry for glass walls and expressed metal shading. Two glazed pavilions—one for student services and the other for dining—frame the axial view to Brookings Hall, continuing in built form what the allée starts with trees. To the south, Weil Hall, KieranTimberlake’s new building for the architecture program, is a glazed structure with aluminum ribs of varied depths, tuned differently on each façade to shade the interior, while preserving views out and in. Next to Weil Hall, an expansion of the Kemper Art Museum required gallery space that precludes daylight for photosensitive artworks, so KieranTimberlake responded with an opaque façade of pleated, polished stainless steel that reflects the campus back to itself.
With that many buildings—all targeting at least LEED Gold—in such close proximity, partner James Timberlake, FAIA, says the goal was to make them “all work together as a community of new buildings, yet also make the other buildings around them better. There’s this oscillation between that new language and the existing one, and the glass buildings become a logical extension, creating something unique while still being very much part of Washington University.”
Next Steps
With 2020 upon us, Webber says the university is very close to achieving the GHG reduction goals laid out a decade ago: “We’re on track to achieve it—we were 97% of the way there last year. Now we have to set the next goal.” Kolker, as campus architect, looks forward to finding that next target. “It’s fascinating that in 1899, a couple of guys in Philadelphia came up with this plan that has served us well for 120 years,” he says. “Are we going to be able to do that for the next 120, or has the increment of change compressed such that we can’t plan for the next 100 years, let alone the next 10? What’s next is a real turning point for us.”
Projects
Anabeth and John Weil Hall
KieranTimberlake with Tao + Lee Associates
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Expansion
KieranTimberlake with Tao + Lee Associates
Gary M. Sumers Welcome Center and Craig and Nancy Schnuck Pavilion
KieranTimberlake with Tao + Lee Associates
Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall
Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners with Mackey Mitchell Architects
Underground Parking Garage
KieranTimberlake and BNIM
Project Credits
Project: East End Transformation
Client: Washington University in St. Louis
Construction Cost: $280 million
Projects: Anabeth and John Weil Hall, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Expansion, Gary M. Sumers Welcome Center, Craig and Nancy Schnuck Pavilion
Architect: KieranTimberlake, Philadelphia . James Timberlake, FAIA, Richard Maimon, FAIA, Marilia Rodrigues, AIA, Kate Czembor, AIA, Adam Loughry, AIA, Nick Sillies, AIA, Charles Sparkman, AIA, Jeremy Leman, Jazz Graves, AIA, Claire Edelen, AIA, Brian Kerr, Suzanne Mahoney, AIA, Patrick Morgan, AIA, Ryan Wall, AIA (project team)
Local Architect: Tao + Lee Associates
FFE: Arcturis
Structural Engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers
MEP Engineer: BuroHappold Engineering, with KAI Engineering
Central Utilities MEP Engineer: McClure Engineering
Civil Engineer: Cole
Geotechnical Engineer: Geotechnology
Construction Manager: McCarthy Building Cos.
Landscape Architect: Michael Vergason Landscape Architects with Arbolope Studio
Lighting Designer: Fisher Marantz Stone
AV Consultant: The Sextant Group
Code Consultant: Code Consultants
Façade Consultant: Eckersley O’Callaghan & Partners
Acoustics: Metropolitan Acoustics
Soils and Irrigation: Jeffrey L. Bruce & Co.
Campus Mobility: Schulze+Grassov
Cost Estimator: The Capital Projects Group
Food Service: Webb Foodservice Design
Waterproofing: Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates
Graphics: Kuhlmann Leavitt
Specifications: Heller & Metzger
LEED Administration: Sustainable Design Consulting
Size: 80,670 gross square feet (Weil Hall); 5,600 gross square feet (Kemper); 25,500 gross square feet (Sumers); 18,000 gross square feet (Schnuck)
Project: Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall
Architect: Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners, Santa Monica, Calif. . Buzz Yudell, FAIA, John Ruble, FAIA, Michael Martin, FAIA, Neal Matsuno, AIA, Stanley Anderson, AIA, Lani Lee, AIA, Clover Linné, AIA, Jason Pytko, AIA, Philippe Arias, Ruth Ortega, Alise Romero (project team)
Associate Architect/Specifications: Mackey Mitchell Architects, St. Louis . Gene Mackey, Marcus Adrian, AIA, Daniel Schneider, AIA, Erik Pizsar, Greg Keppel, AIA, Jake Banton, AIA, Caitlin Siem, John Brown, AIA, Marina Curac (project team)
FFE: Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners
Structural Engineer: Alper Audi
MEP Engineer: BuroHappold Engineering with KAI Engineering
Central Utilities MEP Engineer: McClure Engineering
Civil Engineer: Cole
Geotechnical Engineer: Geotechnology
Construction Manager: McCarthy Building Cos.
Landscape Architect: Michael Vergason Landscape Architects with Arbolope Studio
Lighting Designer: Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design
AV Consultant: The Sextant Group
Code Consultant: BuroHappold Engineering
Acoustics/Vibration: Acentech
Soils and Irrigation: Jeffrey L. Bruce & Co.
Cost Estimator: The Capital Projects Group
Waterproofing: Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates
Graphics: Kolar Design
LEED Administration: Sustainable Design Consulting
Size: 84,000 gross square feet
Project: Ann and Andrew Tisch Park
Landscape Architect: Michael Vergason Landscape Architects, Alexandria, Va. . Michael Vergason (principal-in-charge); Beata Boodell Corcoran (project manager); Doug Hays (principal); Matt Johnston (project captain); Matt Sickle, Kameron Aroom, Don Partlan, Simon Lin (landscape architects)
Local Landscape Architect: Arbolope Studio Soils Consultant: James Bruce Co.
Project: Underground Parking Garage
Architect: KieranTimberlake and BNIM
Architect of Record: BNIM, Kansas City, Mo.
KieranTimberlake Team: James Timberlake, FAIA, Richard Maimon, FAIA, Marilia Rodrigues, AIA, Kate Czembor, AIA, Adam Loughry, AIA, Nick Sillies, AIA, Charles Sparkman, AIA, Jeremy Leman, Jazz Graves, AIA, Claire Edelen, AIA, Brian Kerr, Suzanne Mahoney, AIA, Patrick Morgan, AIA, Ryan Wall, AIA
BNIM Team: Steve McDowell, FAIA, James Pfeiffer, AIA, Craig Scranton, AIA, John Collier, AIA
Structural Engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers, with Desman
MEP Engineer: Integral Group
Vertical Transportation Consultant: Kenneth H. Lemp Elevator Consultant
Size: Approx. 274,000 gross square feet
Project: James M. McKelvey, Sr. Hall (still under construction) Architect: Perkins Eastman, with Patterhn Ives
Size: 86,500 gross square feet
