CAMPUS ENVIRONMENTS
SEPTEMBER 2024
STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY STUDENT CENTER | WRT HOBOKEN, NJ
WRT FIRM OVERVIEW
WRT is a team of planners, urban designers, architects, and landscape architects. We value the impact of our collective approach to create simple solutions for complex problems across scales. We serve our communities by designing places that enhance the natural and social environment.
WRT works across scales and professional disciplines to create forward-thinking, actionable solutions that meet the unique needs of the communities we serve. We promote the cross-pollination of ideas, perspectives, and techniques by emphasizing integrative learning, critical thinking, and creative problem solving among our staff of planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and architects, as well as with our clients and partners. We have always believed that although each professional discipline has a focal area of expertise and concern, each must be viewed as overlapping with the others in a continuum: from the wider ecological, environmental, social, economic, and urban planning factors through landscape, urban design, and ultimately architectural form.
WRT’s success is based on our tradition of excellence, innovation, and leadership in planning and design, and our commitment to the firm’s guiding principles of designing with nature and reinforcing urbanism. We work with communities to address and integrate complex issues related to quality of life and physical character, growth management, economic and fiscal health, infrastructure capacity, and resource preservation and activation. We build on the strengths of those who have come before us, but welcome change as an opportunity to create impact.
Our practice is guided by the following themes:
Placemaking at all Scales
At its core, the craft of placemaking is the process of activating the public realm through design. It is our conviction that placemaking is integral to improving quality of life, supporting inclusive growth, and integrating the shared values of communities.
Achieving Equity
We believe in equitable communities that level playing fields for their most vulnerable citizens—homeless, low-income, youth, elderly, disabled, immigrant, refugee, and LGBTQ. At our core, we believe that while talent is universal, opportunity is not.
Embracing Community Values
The threads of a community create a sense of belonging, strength, comfort, and resiliency. An understanding of these threads—shared stories, common values, a similar culture— forms a foundation from which communities can build capacity, regenerate, and blossom.
Planning For Resiliency
Our planning and design practice is guided by an ecological and systemsbased approach with resiliency at its core. This approach is essential in addressing today’s complex challenges dealing with environmental, social, economic, and technological changes.
SteelStacks Arts & Cultural Campus + Hoover
Mason Trestle
Bethlehem, PA
One of the largest brownfield sites in the country, the former Bethlehem Steel plant is now showcased as part of a unique cultural and entertainment campus known as the SteelStacks. Site planning and landscape design were the hallmarks to unifying a new campus that frames the iconic and sculptural blast furnaces.
The open space and design elements of the SteelStacks landscape provide the foreground to the spectacular scale and physicality of the furnaces. Groves of honey locust trees at each end of the park frame the open amphitheater lawn at the center, creating a unified composition along the northern edge of the site. Clustered lighting among the trees preserves the frame at night, and tall hoop lighting is scattered throughout the campus. The result is a landscape that unfolds through an ever-changing composition of casually clustered and balanced elements. The focal point is the Levitt Pavilion Stage, which sits like a jewel against the backdrop of the massive and powerfully quiet factory.
Above the stage, WRT also reinterpreted and reopened the Hoover-Mason Trestle, once used to carry cars full of ore from the Yard to the blast furnaces. Originally commissioned in 1905, and named for the New York engineering firm that designed it, this overhead conveyance structure now offers visitors the chance to view the furnaces up close, and explore the SteelStacks or watch a performance from an entirely different perspective. At 2000’ in length, it brings a new layer of connectivity, historic interpretation, and passive recreation uses to the Park.
WRT transformed the derelict Bethlehem Steel plant into the premier cultural destination of the Lehigh Valley.
By re-forging a cultural link between historic downtown Bethlehem, the Lehigh River, Lehigh University, and the manufacturing heritage of the Lehigh Valley, the SteelStacks Park and Hoover-Mason Trestle represent a new landscape typology for small, postindustrial cities, and will contribute to the extensive economic resurgence of this former factory town. They serve as a prime example of rediscovered economic and social value found in the authenticity of many of these Rust Belt sites, which WRT embraces and seeks to rediscover.
Since it's opening in Spring 2011, more than one million people have visited this campus and enjoyed 1,750+ musical performances, films, community celebrations and festivals.
Bethlehem Community
Planning: Northside Plan 2027, South New Street Vision, and Bethlehem Pedestrian Bridge Feasibility Study Bethlehem, PA
For more than 10 years, WRT has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with the City of Bethlehem, taking part in some of the City’s innovative placemaking efforts that have infused the City with newfound energy and a distinctive sense of place that is rooted in a rich history and heritage while charting an equally inspiring future. Through our work on the SteelStacks Arts and Cultural Campus, the Northside 2027 Plan—a plan for a neighborhood dealing with the lack of an identity and facing emerging challenges such as multi-modal traffic safety, increasing transiency, and other quality of life issues—and our current work on the South New Street Streetscape— a redesign of the South New Street streetscape with a vision that celebrates the unique character of South Bethlehem and serves as a gateway for Lehigh University Campus while improving safety, accessibility, and connectivity for residents and visitors—WRT has worked intimately in both the north and south side downtowns and neighborhoods, gaining a deep understanding of the values of both of these communities as well as a broader understanding of the City of Bethlehem’s unique context, history, and aspirations. WRT continues to engage in community revitalization projects with the City.
SOUTH NEW ST. CORRIDOR
Our partnership with the City of Bethlehem began in 2009 with the Steelstacks Arts & Cultural Campus, which WRT led from conceptual design and visioning through construction and implementation. One of the largest brownfield sites in the country, the former Bethlehem Steel plant is now showcased as part of a unique cultural and entertainment destination known as the SteelStacks. Site planning and landscape design were the hallmarks to unifying a new campus that frames the iconic and sculptural blast furnaces.
The open space and design elements of the SteelStacks landscape provide the foreground to the spectacular scale and physicality of the furnaces. WRT also reinterpreted and reopened the Hoover-Mason Trestle, once used to carry cars full of ore from the Yard to the blast furnaces, now serves as "a living museum" to preserve the American industrial heritage for future generations.
Most recently, WRT led a feasibility study for a new bridge connecting the north and south sides of the city. The Lehigh River presents a physical barrier between north and south, and exisiting bridges bring unsafe conditions for pedestrians and bikers.
The study explored the potential of a new bridge that is designed to create unity and more linkages between the two distinct downtowns for pedestrians and bikers to enjoy. The bridge is seen as a potential community asset that is expected to bring wide-reaching positive impacts on local economic development, tourism, climate change, property values, transportation alternatives, and as a result, the quality of life in Bethlehem.
Cabrini University Campus Master Plan Radnor, PA
Cabrini’s new campus master plan sought to create a unified campus environment from a fragmented series of places. The plan calls for the inversion of the current campus plan, moving vehicular traffic to its edges and creating a pedestrian focused core, woven together by a rich network of pedestrian paths as well as new and existing open spaces. Campus paths link important buildings and the surrounding wooded environment, often referred to as the “Cathedral of Trees”. The wooded environment is comprised of majestic oaks and tulip poplars with an understory of rhododendrons.
The pedestrian network also serves to link remote areas of the campus including existing residential and athletic facilities. New structures are configured to foster social and collaborative activities and to provide strong connections to the surrounding campus and natural environment. The first phase of the implementation of the campus master plan involves the creation of a new Fitness Pavilion. The pavilion is designed as a great room that unifies the various spaces in the center, connecting its various users, to foster social connections among students, faculty and staff. The pavilion is positioned to strengthen pedestrian connections to the rest of the campus, reducing pedestrian travel distances and improving visibility of the center from the campus core.
Athletic Pavilion at Cabrini University Radnor, PA
The Cabrini Athletic Pavilion is the first phase in the implementation of a new campus master plan that WRT developed in collaboration with Cabrini University. Responding to the master plan’s desire to create an enhanced network of connectivity on campus, the Athletic Pavilion is designed to maximize connections to nature, and to serve as a great room that connects the various programmatic spaces in a central area at the threshold between the existing center and the new building. This strategy promotes social connectivity between various user groups of students, faculty and staff, as well as neighbors in the surrounding community who are welcome to use the facility.
The 17,000-sf renovation and 28,000-sf new facility provides for the University’s increased demand for fitness and wellness spaces for the general student population, and will also provide support facilities for team athletics, with dedicated spaces for athletic strength and conditioning programs as well locker and trainer’s facilities. The design of the new Athletic Pavilion provides a lightness and transparency that promotes a connection between the campus and surrounding environment.
The strategic configuration of social spaces in the Cabrini Athletic Pavilion serve a diverse range of user groups. The social spaces are designed at the intersections of circulation to facilitate a density of uses that are enhanced by their adjacencies to program elements and their connections to the exterior. These spaces offer an intimate scale within the context of the athletic pavilion and the larger campus. Further enhancing the connection back to the campus core and the surrounding landscape, the social and gathering spaces provide a unique urban quality to the collection of spaces along the circulation paths, both inside and outside.
The Pavilion activates visual and physical pedestrian connections creating a unified campus, and strengthening the relationship between the built and natural environment.
Cabrini University South Residence Hall Radnor, PA
Responding to the campus master plan’s desire to create an enhanced network of connectivity on campus, the residence hall is configured to maximize connections to nature and serves as a destination in the larger campus plan. The additional residential space was also needed to accommodate Cabrini’s strategic growth in student population.
The hall flanks Cabrini’s historic mansion building, providing previously underutilized views of an open green and the front entrance of the mansion. It also easily lends itself to year-round use, with the option to provide comfortable summer school housing to further expand campus offerings.
The prominent glass-enclosed social spaces at the building’s north end offer visual connections back to the campus core, while the building and the surrounding landscape form a new courtyard for informal student activities. Glazed elements are stretched vertically and horizontally to emphasize interior public spaces and connections to the outdoors, while offering a range of campus views.
Building on the palette of the surrounding campus, the structure is clad in dark panels and white brick, recognizing the limestone elements found throughout Cabrini.
Shared lounge and interior gathering spaces provide opportunities for student resident activities, including group events, meal preparation, and quiet spaces for study. Gathering spaces accumulate around a central hub adjacent to the building entry, including multi-purpose spaces and a shared student kitchen/dining area. Quiet spaces can be found at the building’s edges, offering spaces for study, collaboration, and ideation, with views of the surrounding woods.
Stevens Institute of Technology Master Plan
Hoboken, NJ
WRT was engaged by Stevens to master plan the expansion of its campus overlooking the Hudson River. The effort encompasses a major rethinking of Stevens’ open space network, which includes a significant new linear park designed to reorient the campus center toward sweeping views of Manhattan.
The plan prioritized 300,000 GSF of new classroom, research, residential, and student life facilities. Each new building will engage and animate the green corridor, which is also intended to serve as a semi-public park for the City of Hoboken. Enhancing community connections is a large part of the master plan, so a proposed market rate housing development will serve as both a campus gateway and also a revenue generator for new classroom and research buildings.
Several specific architectural projects emerged from the Master Plan. First, The Center for Engineering and Scientific Innovation (CESI), a 40,000 GSF classroom and research facility on a site overlooking the Hudson River Park along Sinatra Drive. The project provides space for faculty offices, seminar rooms and computational lab space—along with an extensive landscaped roof terrace framing sweeping views of Lower Manhattan and 170 spaces of fully-enclosed, structured parking. In line with the University's mission, the project is sustainable featuring photovoltaics, natural ventilation, a green roof, and displacement HVAC.
Second is a 535-bed student dormitory that provides a number of 4- and 6-bedroom suites with common lounges, a fitness area, and a café facing the new park. A combination of a 10-story tower with two 5-story wings, the new dorm seeks to reconcile the smaller scale of the inner quad with the more metropolitan scale of the river terrace.
Third is a 60,000 GSF expansion or the existing Student Center and administration tower. The proposed new construction includes a new 350-seat dining/kitchen/ servery and a 200-seat auditorium along with several areas for student activities.
Connected to an existing 1958 vintage building, the new Student Center will update many of Stevens’ basic student services and is designed to take full advantage of its central location and remarkable views of midtown Manhattan and the Hudson River.
Taken as a whole, these projects will not only enhance the lives of students and faculty, but they will also allow Stevens to address many recent issues in campus planning including innovations in teaching environments, community outreach, and sustainability.
The
plan calls for 300,000 GSF of new classroom, research, residential, and student life facilities.
Muhlenberg College Campus Master Plan
Allentown, PA
WRT connected with the campus community through extensive engagement efforts to discuss issues of place-making, academic vision, and residential life. These findings shaped our recommendations, as did review of facility assessments, infrastructure condition reports, landscape design guidelines, and parking policies.
Our Campus Master Plan integrates two distinct parts of campus, carefully preserving the original campus layout organized around the College Green and expanding it to provide a flexible development framework. Two new academic buildings—the Center for Student Engagement and the Integrative Academic Building—will reinforce the interdisciplinary curriculum, while the expansion and renovation of Trexler Library will add collaborative learning spaces. We recommend more active uses along West Chew Street and reinvigorating dead spaces by creating a new 1,000-seat capacity theater that takes advantage of campus topography and views.
The Plan also proposes two new residence halls that will anchor outdoor spaces and could include ground-level retail. To reinforce the unity of buildings and ample outdoor public spaces, we recommend three new walkway loops and four east-west pedestrian paths.
The campus planning process helped to determine both a long-range vision and short-term priorities and projects for implementation. All recommendations were carefully evaluated for fundraising potential, impact on achieving the Strategic Plan objectives, and ability to meet urgent academic and residential needs.
Stevens Institute of Technology University Center Hoboken, NJ
The Stevens Institute of Technology's new University Center marks a monumental step in the campus's evolution. This project is the outcome of a comprehensive master plan developed by WRT, which identified the pressing need for a new student center and student housing on the Stevens campus. This building plays a pivotal role in enhancing the student experience as living-learning communities facilitate students’ sense of belonging.
The recently opened University Center Complex also adds significant new communal areas to the campus, including event spaces, small lounges on each floor and “hangout spaces” throughout the building where informal interactions can take place. The UCC also delivers student collaboration and meeting space space previously lacking on the Stevens campus. WRT was responsible for the architectural design of the interior of the University Center. The University Center integrates various student-centric facilities such as dining spaces, a fitness center, student activity areas, offices, and a large lecture space with Manhattan views. Additional features include a 4,500 square foot multipurpose event space, along with a lobby and lounge areas.
Living-learning communities facilitate students’ sense of belonging.
"When
students feel fundamentally connected and seen it becomes more comfortable to seek help when they encounter difficulties. We’ve woven this support into the fabric of the institution.”
- Sara Klein, Ph.D. Vice President for Student Affairs Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens Institute of Technology Academic Gateway Complex
Hoboken, NJ
The 90,000 SF Academic Gateway Complex is a direct expression of the Institute’s commitment to innovation. The LEED Gold Academic Gateway Complex houses a highly varied set of academic units, including the Digital Learning Library, the Computer Science Department, the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education, the Bio-Innovation Center, as well as the Innovation and Design Laboratory.
The Institute’s goals also include the phased construction of a center for technological advancement, straddling Stevens’s east part of the intersection at Hudson and 6th Streets. The two wings will be connected by a dramatic arched sky bridge entrance to the new landscape of the lower pedestrian campus. In addition, it will create extraordinary meeting and seminar space with Hudson River and Manhattan views. WRT was engaged by Stevens Institute to master plan the expansion of its campus overlooking the Hudson River, with plans that call for new classroom, research, residential, and student life facilities. Each new building will engage and animate this green corridor which is also intended to serve as a semi-public park for the City of Hoboken. Enhancing community connections is a large part of the plan, and several specific architectural projects emerged from the Master Plan, including the Academic Gateway Complex.
The Academic Gateway Complex is an expression of Stevens Institute’s values -successfully articulating their commitment to innovation.
Temple University Gateway Transformation +
Mazur and Gladfelter Terrace
Philadelphia, PA
Building on WRT’s work on Temple University’s Campus Landscape Master Plan in Philadelphia, WRT developed around a strategic framework called the “campus collage”, and eventually oversaw a multi-phase, multi-year implementation, transforming an eastern gateway into the campus and repairing and redesigning an existing plaza deck to program the area to create a more inviting and accessible environment for students and faculty.
WRT designed and implemented a green terrace, and a newly landscaped Polett Walk that serves as a gateway into the campus from public transit stations to the east of the campus. The green terrace, featuring a lawn space, outdoor seating, study areas, and a direct connection to the newly conceived Polett Walk, created a bright and inviting space that is frequently used by students, especially those accessing campus via the SEPTA Regional Rail. Polett Walk, a major east-west thoroughfare through the campus, is one of the most congested circulation spaces across campus. As such, careful scheduling and timing of design and construction was required to ensure the continued functionality of the walk, not only as a circulation space, but also as an important ingress and egress into surrounding buildings that exit directly onto the walkway. Work with the University to understand peak flows and strategically timing the construction process to align with a less congested summer schedule, while introducing new means of circulation to accommodate
construction processes all led to a successful programming implementation of this critical circulation corridor. Polett Walk was reconceived as part of this process to strategically provide enhanced circulation space flowing into and out of surrounding buildings, while also strategically programming moments of the walkway to complement adjacent gathering spaces for multi-scalar interactions, from individual work areas to larger group gathering areas that expand the usefulness and programs offered by the project.
Together, Polett Walk and Mazur & Gladfelter Terrace serve as a new gateway to Temple’s campus. This entrance to the campus has long been established, but its recent transformation now greets the thousands of students, faculty, and staff who arrive by train daily, reshaping their initial experience of the campus. This redevelopment provides dynamic, adaptable new learning environments that allow this area of the campus to evolve with changing teaching methods, learning styles, and the seasonal fluctuations of student life.
“THIS
PROJECT CREATES A BOLD NEW EASTERN GATEWAY AND ENTRY SEQUENCE TO TEMPLE’S CAMPUS”
- DOZIE IBEH, ASSOCIATE VP OF TEMPLE’S PROJECT DELIVERY GROUP
UCSF at Parnassus Heights
San Francisco, CA
Over the last century and a half, UCSF has evolved into one of the world’s preeminent health-science institutions, and serves a critical role in teaching, research, patient care, and community service. Given its incremental growth and urban setting—surrounded by the Cole Valley and Sunset neighborhoods—the campus has been challenged to provide a cohesive campus environment while also serving the surrounding community.
Originally built in 1933, the Clinical Sciences Building is located on Parnassus Avenue, a busy city corridor providing for the competing interests of transit service, vehicles, pedestrians, and bicyclists. After undergoing a four-year renovation, including a seismic retrofit, the new CSB solves a long-standing problem on Parnassus—the wall of buildings that cut off access to other areas on campus. A new public pathway—the Holly Smith Gateway, provides people entering the CSB from Parnassus Avenue direct access up to Saunders Court and the interior campus.
WRT’s landscape design creates a strong sense of “campus” connecting interior campus public space more strongly to Parnassus Avenue. The design language includes a generous and consistent sidewalk, cohesive
planting, continuous storm water treatment network, variety of seating areas and social spaces, unified site furnishings, and gateway elements.
Social spaces varying in size, treatment and use of design elements contribute to a cohesive open space network that unifies and enhances the experience of campus. Plant communities generate habitat value, reflect the native ecology, promote waterefficiency, and increase hydrologic function of planting zones—zones specifically designed and planted for stormwater absorption, filtration, and conveyance to manage stormwater flows and reduce urban run-off.
Social spaces are vital to creating a successful streetscape for Parnassus Avenue. These spaces are integrated with building and streetscape design, resulting in vibrant, inviting, comfortable areas that support social interaction, user needs, and everyday collegiate life.
Public art and unique landscape interventions are a powerful means of adding warmth, interest, human scale, and distinctiveness to the campus site.
Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus
Silicon Valley, CA
WRT served as the landscape architect for this new 643,000-square-foot / 32-acre (13 ha) to support up to 3,000 employees in a state-of-the-art, sustainable facility. , the grounds for which now emphasizes ecological restoration adjacent to the Stevens Creek riparian corridor and strong connections between the landscape and interior collaborative spaces and dining facilities. The riparian ecology of the creek is extended through a series of wetland depressions punctuated by Oak Uplands and Savannah. In addition to integrating natural habitat into the campus itself, the design helps restore natural habitat with 30 native species and utilizes stormwater collection, filtration, reuse, and redistribution to help improve the creek.
While the majority of the campus features native planting species, including the scrub and grassland ecologies of the green roof and inner campus private zones, unique botanical plant collections from other subtropical and Mediterranean climates around the globe are showcased through the interior courtyards. This symbolizes Microsoft's global presence.
The extensive green roof can be accessed by employees for outdoor dining, casual gathering, individual contemplation as well as point-to-point circulation to key stair/elevator points down to work spaces and other destinations. The courtyards punched into the green roof give access to both working levels and bring fresh air and light into the team workspaces.
Microsoft's campus is netzero, non-potable water certified, it has achieved LEED Platinum, Living Building Challenge, and Well Building Standard certification
