Looking across Jones Valley from atop Red Mountain, it’s easy to pick out UAB’s footprint in the sprawling cityscape. With the skyscrapers and condos of Birmingham’s Downtown and Parkside districts to the north and the historic structures of the Southside and Glen Iris neighborhoods to the south, the red brick of many of UAB’s signature buildings makes the campus distinctive. But as UAB grows and its public realm is enhanced with new and remodeled facilities, who determines what the campus will look like in the future?
Broadly, that’s the job of the Facilities Division, but specifically, it falls to the Planning, Design & Construction office. PD&C is organized into five teams of multi-disciplinary engineers, designers, and building experts. Each team has designated responsibilities, from the institutional units they support (athletics, schools and colleges, campus recreation, information technology) to the work itself (master planning, campus grounds, renovations, accessibility, sustainability).
A living lab
The PD&C team understands both the challenges and opportunities of developing an urban campus like UAB. Their goal is to understand how campus is used as part of the larger community of UAB and Birmingham, and then respond to that in a way that establishes what they call the “cohesion of campus.”
“We’re one university, but we’re made up of all these different colleges, schools, and departments, and each one has their own initiatives and goals they want to achieve with each project,” says Denton Lunceford, assistant vice president for Planning, Design & Construction. “We’re not an older college where every building looks exactly the same. We’re a younger university, we’re more eclectic, and we want to keep it new and exciting for students, so there’s a challenge to make it all make sense. You don’t want it to feel like individual projects stamped and placed next to each other. How do you smooth all that together and make it feel like a cohesive university?”
To do that, the Facilities Division relies on the Campus Master Plan, which will be updated next year, to guide their decision-making. They also conduct district studies—the next one will focus on a busy area of campus around the new Science and Engineering Complex—to assess everything from foot and vehicle traffic, building access, landscape architecture, lighting, signage, and more to ensure the campus isn’t only beautiful, but efficient, safe, and useful.
But their decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. PD&C receives regular feedback from students, faculty, and staff to ensure they make fiscally responsible choices with broad, generational benefits. The team also works closely with colleges, schools, Enrollment Management, Student Affairs, Finance & Administration, the Office of the Provost, and units to make UAB appealing to prospective students and to ensure that our campus and facilities provide the best possible environment for working, teaching, learning, and research.
Lunceford says that feedback is key to creating this kind of environment. “We really care about relationships here,” he says. “We have a relationship with each of these stakeholders across campus in the different colleges and schools, and it’s not like [a current job] is going to be our last project with any of them. So it’s important that we deliver the best possible building that meets their needs.”
“Our goal is to take their ideas and manifest them in the physical space and ensure that our campus is inviting not just to prospective students but to everyone who is here, every person who interacts with it,” says Brian Templeton, director of Team U within PD&C. “We think of our campus as a ‘living lab.’ How can we create spaces where learning is always happening? We need to foster that mindset and figure out how to create those spaces that bring learning across the entire campus. I think that it should be the mission of every campus planner and designer to build those opportunities wherever we can.”
The design process
But how does the Facilities team convert stakeholders’ ideas into landmark campus buildings and green spaces?
First, PD&C establishes the project needs, locates the possible spaces that will work (either remodeled buildings or new ones), confirms the funding sources, and defines the project scope. Then, they utilize the expertise of design consultants on the project. The consultants, led by an architect or engineer, usually come back with three to five different concepts, all designed to work at a specific campus site. To ensure the right design is chosen, stakeholders from the respective UAB unit or organization serve on the project’s design review committee.
“We try not to restrict the consultants’ creativity,” Templeton says. “They’re incentivized not to have a signature style because we need to engage the community on each project and then allow them to make good design choices based on those needs.”
Templeton says that using outside designers can drive innovation and efficiency. “Allowing them to be creative introduces us to new materials we might not have considered. We want to be flexible in how we approach things. We also rely on specialists who may have specific knowledge, like the fresh and efficient wet lab design in the newly constructed McCallum Basic Health Sciences Building.”
And choosing the right design partners can have benefits that go far beyond aesthetics. “We seek to work with consultants who have offices in Birmingham and who have local experience. They’re more accessible throughout the project, and most of them have a very good understanding of UAB,” Templeton continues. “And using local firms keeps money in our community. We’re reinvesting where we live and work.”
While UAB has long been defined by its brick buildings, newer buildings feature more glass and metal. “There is a brick standard, the ‘UAB brick blend,’ and it’s very distinctive for our campus,” Templeton says. “But brick can be expensive to maintain as it ages, and it’s not the most cost-effective way to maintain our campus, so we’re looking at new materials that are more efficient and can be more easily replaced and updated with a new look. It’s more of a long-range, long-term approach.”
More glass and less brick also help our buildings engage their surroundings. “Using the glass allows us to get more natural daylight into the buildings easier, improving the work environment inside the buildings,” Templeton says. “What that also does is allow people on the street to feel seen. An important aspect of urban design is securing public spaces. Having visibility from the building out onto the street helps the people on the street feel safer because everyone can see you from their offices as you’re walking by.”
“Using glass allows us to get more natural daylight into the buildings.”
—Brian Templeton, UAB Facilities
Establishing an identity
Under the leadership of President Ray L. Watts, UAB’s strategic plan, along with its campus master plan, are guiding campus development to serve the needs of students, faculty, staff, and patients. “Our active and planned projects are designed to foster collaboration, allow access to world-class facilities, and provide the UAB community an opportunity to thrive,” Watts says.
Anchored by those plans, UAB’s campus has radically transformed in the last 20 years—most significantly in the past decade—so it’s a high priority for PD&C to keep disparate projects feeling like they’re all part of the same institution.
“We might be managing a project for the Collat School of Business, while a block over, the College of Arts and Sciences is constructing a new building to meet their needs, and the aesthetics may vary with different architects on each project—those design influences are unique and distinctive,” Lunceford says.
“How do we maintain our UAB identity while we’re adapting to all these pedagogical and sociological, and cultural changes that are happening all around us? That’s our challenge,” Templeton says. “One of the things that drew me to UAB was to plan and design a campus in an urban environment. You know it will be difficult, but it will always be interesting because you have different problems with different solutions every time. It’s challenging because we’re a large entity inside larger entities, but it creates a sense of community for everyone if we do it right. We want the Birmingham community to enjoy our campus and be welcome on campus, but we want them to know they’re on UAB’s campus. We want to establish UAB as a distinct area.”
“We’re a public university in the middle of a downtown, and we need to operate like that, he adds. “I consider every space that’s on campus that’s not inside a building to be a public space that is owned by the taxpayers and the citizens of Alabama, and we need to steward it as such and take care of it as it belongs to them and all future generations.”
Templeton and Lunceford say that UAB’s relative youth—only 55 years old—is an advantage when it comes to designing and developing campus.
“It allows us to be flexible,” Templeton says. “Many of our alumni came to UAB to get a world-class education and to make a difference in the world after they graduated. They didn’t come to UAB for the architecture or because of family history or tradition. UAB offered an education at a price that was convenient to them, and the alumni appreciate that, but they also appreciate what campus looks like now. Now they’re even more proud because we’re starting to take on the shape of what people think of as a traditional university.”
“We have some historic buildings that we’ll maintain because they’re amazing structures: Spencer Honors House, the Ullman Building, Jefferson Towers—they have such a history with them, and we acknowledge those histories,” Templeton says. “But it’s a different situation here than at other universities that have been established for longer because they have buildings that have been standing twice as long as our university has existed.”
“Our projects provide the UAB community an opportunity to thrive.”
—President Ray L. Watts
Looking to the future
Lunceford says that after years of rapid growth on the academic side of campus, new institutional initiatives are fueling high-profile projects in the medical district.
“While all areas of the institution will continue to grow, the medical and research environments are a focus for us in the coming years,” he says. “The Research Strategic Initiative established by President Watts is a lot of the fuel behind the new Biomedical Research and Psychology Building, for example. And looking at a project like McCallum Basic Health Science Building, that went from an outdated building to what’s now a showpiece for the School of Medicine. They’re now using it to recruit faculty who do transformative wet lab research.”
Lunceford also points out that their work isn’t all about new or improved buildings. “We’re focused on road diets like the one we did on 10th Avenue South and we’re now about to do on 13th Street South. We’re also focused on deferred maintenance and energy management. Those type of projects will be ongoing so we can continue be an attraction for students, faculty, and staff.”
Templeton, a landscape architect by training, is excited about PD&C’s current evaluation of the Campus Green. “We’re hearing from students that they would like more seating areas in the Green, so we’re looking at ways to create smaller environments within the larger Green for eating, studying and having conversations.”
Templeton says that while architecture and design are important, they are not really what’s most important in defining the essence of UAB. “One of the things I love about UAB is the people and culture here, and that’s our identity. It’s the culture our people build—our built environment takes a back seat to that in my mind. I’ve never thought any college campus is defined by its architectural elements. To me, architecture doesn’t create identity. Individuals, communities, and people create identity. Our built environment should reflect how we engage with each other and foster that engagement. We find ways our projects can elevate and intersect with our strategic mission and shared values. That’s what our built environment should be about. It supplements our identity. It doesn’t create it.”