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As Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) experiences exponential growth of its online programs, it continues to invest in its physical campus, most notably in a new college of engineering. While the university is not looking to increase its on-campus enrollment, it is expanding its offerings on its Manchester, N.H., campus, with new facilities, an academic quad, two new residence halls, and a large greenspace. The centerpiece of this investment is the $45 million, 68,000-sf College of Engineering, Technology and Aeronautics (CETA), the first new academic building added to the Manchester campus in over a decade. The CETA building, which opened in January, is SNHU’s first new facility devoted to engineering technologies, and will help expand access to STEM education in the New England region.

Maker spaces, active learning labs, and multidisciplinary collaboration spaces have become essential elements for educational engineering facilities nationwide, as academic institutions respond to the demands of modern industry. In addition to providing the robust infrastructure and fabrication tools engineering students need to develop practical skills, another important element of these space types is an emphasis on teamwork, entrepreneurship, and commercial viability. This means positioning maker and capstone project spaces in close proximity to meeting rooms, support spaces, and team collaboration zones. High-profile maker spaces also serve to help institutions increase industry partnership opportunities as well as student and faculty recruitment.

The growing complexity of research has heightened vivarium design requirements, making it imperative that facility operators and users work closely with the architect and engineers in the early planning stages of construction and renovation projects. Resolving these 10 recurring issues up front can help avoid problems down the road.

Construction of the $65 million Wanek School of Natural Sciences at High Point University (HPU) in North Carolina is part of a campus transformation that began in 2005. The 127,417-sf Wanek building, which opened in August 2019 to house the biology, chemistry, and physics departments, is helping HPU meet the demand for more space to accommodate an increasing number of students and faculty.

The use of software to aid in master planning is nothing new. At Payette, however, designers and engineers have collaborated to create new software tools to solve master planning issues as they emerge. “We have a range of really complex problems,” explains Jeffrey DeGregorio, a principal at Payette. “Because they’re part of these large-scale master plans, we need to represent them very clearly to be able to tell a story. I think Payette occupies this complicated little niche—complex organizations, complicated campuses.”