The Importance of Activating Outdoor Spaces on College Campuses
Panel Includes:
Byron Sampson – University Landscape Architect & Associate Director, Arizona State University
Tom Flynn, RLA – Landscape Architect, Penn State University
Roberto Rovira, PLA, ASLA – Professor & Chair FIU Landscape Architecture + Environmental Design, Florida International University, & Principal, Studio Robert Rovira
Moderator:
Aan Garrett-Coleman, ASLA, LEED, AP – President & Founder, Coleman & Associates
The webinar kicked off with an overview discussion of each panelist’s experience in addressing the opportunities and challenges of designing for students on their respective college campuses. Detailing the landscape architecture of Arizona State University, Byron Sampson describes working at the intersection of desert design and campus space design. “We’re looking for ways to make the campuses in our system more indicative of the Sonoran Desert and the environment in which we live,” he says. Sampson identifies his key planning considerations, including the need to correlate campus traffic patterns and student feedback with location-specific factors like mitigating climate change’s impact on the desert landscape. Sampson and his team also identified the important role that visibility plays in communicating senses of comfort and safety. “Even more so than access to our blue phone campus emergency access system, being able to see and be seen and being in proximity to high-traffic areas proved very important to our students.” Sampson continues to describe his approach to merging the need for visibility with the need for climate adaptation, detailing different methods of structural and vegetative shade that gather students in spaces that are both physically and emotionally welcoming.
Roberto Rovira joins the discussion, describing some of the significant changes he’s experienced at the Florida International University campus brought on both by the advent of remote learning and the changing desires of university students. “Universities are becoming more and more like small cities, and their needs and services don’t end at any specific time,” he says. Rovira continues on to stress the importance of viewing campus design through both the dimensions of space and time. He describes the need for outdoor space to be able to adapt to both organized and unstructured activities, offering inspiring collective and individual experiences at different points throughout the day. He shares examples of dynamic design on the FIU campus—quads that become hubs of evening activity, passthrough spaces that become canvases for presentation, and façades that become outdoor theaters after dark.
