Latest Reports

A traditional master plan process runs the risk of being an exercise in futility if the result is a document that sits on a shelf and becomes quickly outdated. This often happens because an institution does not know how to convert existing data into meaningful information that can guide discussions and decision-making related to facilities and campus development. Pairing the intelligent use of available data with design processes that engage individual users and stakeholders’ perspectives can be a game-changer. This combination—what we refer to as a “living” master plan—can tell a more accurate story and become a better and more refined decision-support tool than an obsolete master plan or a one-time data analysis report, and can provide value based on real-time data long after the plan is “completed.”

At its new West Campus, Yale University is incrementally repurposing and renovating a former corporate pharmaceutical manufacturing facility for new interdisciplinary programs, including the Energy Sciences Institute (ESI) and Yale West Campus Materials Characterization Core (MCC).

The Greer Environmental Sciences Center at Virginia Wesleyan University is the institution’s response to a nearly 100 percent enrollment increase in their environmental sciences and biology department over five years. Located near the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia Beach, the new 40,000-sf academic science building expands the university’s existing facilities to increase collaboration between science disciplines and regional partners, leveraging the school’s location at the mouth of the James River, where the 300-acre campus maintains a park-like setting with old growth forests and native wetlands in the middle of a dense, rapidly growing urban center.

Webster University’s new Browning Hall, Interdisciplinary Science Building, has transformed the university’s focus on science by tripling the number of science labs on campus. The 84,000-sf facility houses the departments of anthropology and sociology, biological sciences, international language and cultures, nurse anesthesia, nursing, and psychology, and the Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies.

Carnegie Mellon University is rethinking the way it approaches change management by broadening how it approaches the people involved. A workspace is not just four walls that contain an employee; there are also memories and a sense of identity tied up in that space. Doing the hard work of acknowledging those feelings, and working closely with employees to address their fear of change, can lay the groundwork for a more successful transition into a new space.