The Public University: Driving the Future
By Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham, FAIA
From left to right: Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham, FAIA, Adam Baacke, Kelly Hayes-McAlonie, FAIA and Douglas Marshall, AIA. Photo credit: Mahbuba Nahid N. Khan, AIA.
A panel with a focus on Massachusetts and New York public universities featured Adam Baacke, Commissioner, Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Kelly Hayes-McAlonie, FAIA, LEED AP, Director of Campus Planning, University of Buffalo, and Douglas Marshall, AIA, Assistant Director for Campus Planning, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. The speakers explored the important role that architects in civic service play in ensuring that public assets are aligned with the community’s values and support the institutional mission.
Moderated by Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham, FAIA, the panelists engaged in a broad discussion of how to meet capital funding challenges with strategies for building and maintaining sustainable and resilient facilities that support vibrant communities. Here are some takeaways:
- Governor Maura Healey’s higher education bill, the Bright Act, intends to invest up to $2.5 billion in new capital funding to modernize public higher education infrastructure while expanding access to 21st-century skills for students. A “shark chart”, showing MA investments in state infrastructure (in GSF) over the course of three centuries, provided the context for this historic investment by illustrating the high impact of mid-century modern facilities on the state portfolio.
- While MA and NY have different governance and funding models, each state leverages their public university to accomplish a range of strategic goals, such as developing important new technologies, providing workforce development, increasing access to housing, achieving decarbonization goals, and much more.
- All panelists emphasized the importance of design and construction standards that underscore design excellence, facility flexibility, sustainability and resilience, and that respect the culture and history of each institution.
- And all described efforts to use new project delivery methods, and to establish public-private-institutional partnerships that result in innovative economic solutions for strategic new construction projects, renewal of existing facilities, and for monetizing state assets.