UW-Madison facilities planners recently began formulating design guidelines to chart the development of new buildings and guide the appearance of future campus architecture.
Gary Brown, Director of Facilities Planning and Management, said the design guidelines will be completed in July or August and will provide design themes to architects as part of the UW Campus Master Plan.
Brown explained that the Master Plan will not suggest sweeping building redevelopments for the campus as a whole but will instead focus on distinguishable clusters of buildings.
\Neighborhoods of design are going to be established,"" Brown said.
The guidelines will prescribe sets of architectural design characteristics for particular campus areas such as the School of Engineering, the Agriculture Campus or the Bascom Hill area. Each area will be distinguished by a certain look based on building materials and heights, windows, use of glass and metal, and roof style. Brown said planners are combining such design elements to create specific design themes.
Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor of Facilities Planning and Management said he anticipates four or five architectural ""neighborhoods"" on campus.
""What you're going to see is more five- and-six story buildings on campus, which are easier to develop a community around,"" Fish said. ""Towers are just kind of the enemy of the community. We will not be building towers.""
Brown said that in terms of architectural style, planners will most likely diverge from the post-modern or ""brutalistic"" look of some buildings constructed in the 1960s.
""I would expect that the campus is going to stay away from that design theme and maybe look at more of a traditional campus architecture,"" Brown said. ""That doesn't mean it can't be modern architecture or contemporary architecture, it just needs to be based on traditional architectural themes.""
""We're trying to take a contemporary style but one that is not trendy,"" said Fish.
Brown cited the new Biochemistry Building on Babcock Drive and University Avenue as a great example of traditionally themed architecture with a modern, contemporary edge.
""By picking up on some of the really great themes that we already have, we can improve on what we've done for the last thirty or forty years,"" Fish said.
The Master Plan will consider the mass (length, width and height) and blueprints of buildings to give architects some direction but individual architectural firms will design specific buildings.
Planners listed likeable buildings as those that are made of locally quarried, warm, tan-colored limestone or sandstone where windows are placed in a regular order. Buildings that have these characteristics include most buildings on Bascom Hill, Agriculture Hall, Memorial Union, School of Human Ecology and several lakeshore dorms including Elizabeth Waters, among others.
Undesirable styles include boxy buildings with small or no windows that do not open and imposing exteriors with little detail or texture. Fish said Humanities, Van Hise, Peterson and Ogg Hall are all coming down.
The head architect hired for the Master Plan, Dan Okoli, has designed buildings at Ohio State University and Pace University in New York. Fish said, ""He has a great eye for exactly what we're talking about.""
""The important part of the job is not only to design individually good buildings but to think about how they all fit together,"" Fish added.
-Ivy Okoniewski contributed to this report
