The sound of construction is a familiar one to anyone who has been to Carleton University’s campus in recent years. The list of recent projects is lengthy – Lennox and Addington residence, the Residence Commons expansion, the River Building, and MacOdrum Library expansion, to name a few. But why are these changes being made? How does Carleton plan the future of its campus? And is it the right plan to meet a shifting post-secondary landscape?
The Master Plan
The architect’s rendering of Carleton’s campus in the Carleton Master Plan is a glimpse into a utopian dream decades in the future.
Students and faculty stroll on rooftop lawns, while a green, terraced corridor slopes down from the university quad to the banks of the Rideau River. In the background, Dunton Tower stands alone, a relic of an earlier plan for the university’s campus.
The drawing is only the cover of an 86-page document which lays out a detailed vision of Carleton’s future, addressing topics ranging from green space to pedestrian flow.
Carleton’s student population has continued to grow each year, which means an increase in faculty, personnel and services. For the academic year 2012-2013, Carleton has an enrolment of more than 22,000 full-time graduate and undergraduate students.
This is still less than the University of Ottawa, which has close to 32,000 full-time students, according to Common University Data.
The 2010 master plan is intended to guide that expansion, looking at the needs of the university and how to best serve them with the opportunities provided on campus. In some ways it’s like planning a small city whose primary industry is higher learning. Yet there’s no way of knowing whether Carleton’s plan will be the right one for the coming years.
The guiding hand
Carleton’s 2010 Master Plan was designed by du Toit Allsopp Hillier (DTAH), a Toronto-based architecture firm that has designed master plans for Queen’s University and the University of Guelph, among others.
To oversee the creation of the plan, Carleton’s administration formed a “steering committee” of administration officials and facilities personnel. They established guidelines and rules. DTAH crafted the proposal after consultation with the steering committee as well as the wider Carleton community.
“We took a snapshot in 50 years,” said Darryl Boyce, a member of the steering committee and associate vice-president of Carleton’s facilities management and planning.
“If we built out the entire campus, what would it look like,” he asked.
Carleton campus is blessed in the amount of space it has to build on compared to other universities.
However, by the time of the 2010 plan, most of the easiest land to build on was already in use. Carleton had to not only look at building anew, but redeveloping. Part of the appeal of any university is the campus environment it offers, and Carleton has a lot to work with in that regard.
Blessed and cursed
Bordered by the Rideau Canal on one side and the Rideau River on another, with a sizeable amount of green space, Carleton is well-situated. Yet it still carries a legacy of past campus plans and old, tired facilities, which sometimes work against the current desires of the administration.
An example of this is the quad, one of the first planned spaces on Carleton’s campus. Originally envisioned as being open to the Rideau Canal and the Rideau River, it was gradually sealed off from the outside world. The last opening to the Rideau Canal was plugged in spectacular style by Dunton Tower in the 1970s.
Authors Blair Neatby and Don McEown wrote in Creating Carleton: The Shaping of a University that Dunton Tower went against everything that had previously been planned for the campus. The burgeoning campus needed a quick fix for its space problems, and a 22-storey tower was chosen despite its marked contrast with the rest of the university’s facilities.
“The idea [with planning Carleton] is trying to make the best of a fairly awkward set of relationships,” said Ben Gianni, an associate professor of architecture at Carleton. Sometimes the needs of the university dictate the development that takes place rather than a long-term plan for the future. Student enrolment, research activities, and other factors don’t always work with the long-term plan for campus.
“It’s a very piecemeal process to try and coax order of something that approaches chaos,” Gianni said.
A new plan
Yet a fresh perspective on how to develop campus brings the promise of renewal. With the enactment of the 2010 Carleton Master Plan, the quad is set to be opened to at least one of Carleton’s waterways – the Rideau River. This corridor requires the demolition of Paterson Hall, which currently stands in the way.
“Because the buildings in the way needed major repair and were of an unsustainable low density, this provided the opportunity to connect the campus to the river, as well as providing a significant amount of needed floor space, two of the major interests of the community,” Roger du Toit, a partner at du Toit said.
Another part of the quad renewal is the renovation to MacOdrum Library. Currently being completed, the overhaul of the library has a budget of $23 million, according to Valerie Critchley, associate librarian at the library.
“We’re doubling the student space and the quality of the space is going to be massively improved,” said Margaret Haines, the university librarian.
“I think it was quite clear the architects felt that improving the appearance . . . of some of the existing heritage buildings on site would make a dramatic impact on the whole campus in terms of morale and the use of space,” Haines said.
A common starting point
Carleton’s current growth was spurred in part by a province-wide phenomenon known as the “double cohort.” When the government of Ontario eliminated Grade 13 in 2003, universities all over the province faced a “double cohort” of the graduating Grade 12s and the last Grade 13s. To help the post-secondary sector prepare for this, Ontario’s government provided “SuperBuild” funding to construct new facilities and expand capacity to accommodate the surge in enrolment. This provided a necessary boost for universities across Ontario to take a new look at what they wanted their campuses to look like. Some of these universities haven’t stopped growing since then.
A campus like ours
Carleton is not the only university going through redevelopment amid growth. Western University has been experiencing rapid growth as well.
Western University is similar in many respects to Carleton in the size and characteristics of its campus. Like Carleton, Western University occupies a large space with prominent natural features, with its mostly undeveloped University Hill and the Thames River bordering it. It doesn’t have a satellite campus and is located in a mid-sized city.
It is also similar in size. In 2011 it had a fall enrolment of more than 26,000 full-time students.
“In the last five years . . . we’ve added about 500,000 square feet,” said Mike McLean, manager of Planning & Design at Western.
Western’s last campus plan was in 2007, McLean said, and since then the university has added some updates.
“The province has indicated to us that by 2015 we’ll have a significant increase in first-year enrolment, mostly due to pressure from the GTA,” McLean said. The province is able to track possible changes in enrolment based on growth in the GTA, McLean said.
The 2007 campus plan did not see the need for any increase in residence capacity for Western. But on the strength of the province’s suggestion, Western broke ground on a new 1,000-bed residence last year.
There are rules for this growth however. Western wants to preserve those aspects of campus that are unique to the university. “There’s University Hill, which is somewhat sacred ground,” McLean said, adding that it wasn’t likely there would be any more development on the hill. “We want to maintain that vista as you come through the main gates.”
Cramping its style
Closer to home, the University of Ottawa is also exploring its options for rapidly expanding research programs and swelling enrollment.
“There’s been a dramatic increase in our research activities, which demand higher facilities,” said Claudio Brun del Re, director of Physical Resources Service at the University of Ottawa.
Post-graduate student numbers have also increased, Brun del Re said, which dramatically increases the study space required on campus.
The University of Ottawa is much more limited in its campus options than Carleton. Set in the heart of downtown Ottawa, there is very little room for horizontal growth. If the university wants to expand, the only direction it can build is up.
“Because we’re landlocked, we’re redeveloping existing sites,” Brun del Re said.
“We’ll tear down a smaller building to build a bigger one.”
An example of this would be the recently opened 15-storey social sciences building.
The problem with this, Brun del Re said, is that university buildings don’t function well as high-rises. It’s the reason why Dunton Tower will probably be the only high-rise structure at Carleton for the foreseeable future.
“The ideal university building is probably six stories or less, and you’ll see that throughout the world,” Brun del Re said. “It has to do with the volume of people entering and exiting at all times of the day, and the challenge of moving them vertically.”
Unlike most other buildings, a university facility has to be able to handle a sudden influx of thousands of people in accordance with class times. A vertical building like Dunton Tower simply can’t handle that number of people effectively.
On the flip side, the University of Ottawa’s compact, highly developed campus is a very efficient in energy use and emissions, Brun del Re said.
A different plan
For the time being the University of Ottawa has chosen not to develop its campus according to a long-term plan.
“The traditional thing that everyone does is they have a big consultant team and they do this master plan,” said Brun del Re. “And it comes back as a huge document and pretty pictures that everyone has at their desk.”
“When we decided in 2003 to redraw our master plan we made a conscious effort to not make it a pretty picture single document,” he said. Instead, the University of Ottawa prepares a number of different “layers” of information, each one with its own experts and handlers, who can be called upon whenever a project is at hand.
“Every time we do a project it impacts the current thinking about how that plan works,” Brun del Re said. “In five years we’ve added three buildings we never thought we’d have five years ago. How do you plan for that?”
Predicting the future
Brun del Re admits that some officials on the University of Ottawa’s planning councils do want to see a more official plan in the future, once the current building craze calms down a little.
But he sticks to his opinion that a formal master plan leaves much to be desired in terms of flexibility.
He’d like to see a more “transparent” plan, with different components that could be altered as circumstances change.
According to Boyce, Carleton’s approach still maintains enough flexibility to be effective. As associate vice-president of facilities management, Boyce will review the Master Plan along with the rest of the steering committee in 2015.
Circumstances may have changed to the point where certain components of the 2010 Master Plan need to be changed or abandoned entirely. Revisiting the plan every five years allows the university to re-assess its plans, Boyce said.
“It’s the best of both worlds I believe.”
