Ripon College, a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin, has a parking shortage problem. Rather than pave over more campus with new parking lots, the college's president has offered first-year students free mountain bikes if they do not bring a car to campus. From the Chronicle of Higher Education article:

The college has purchased 200 Trek bikes to give to a portion of the roughly 300 first-year students that will arrive in the fall. After students sign a honor code, saying that they will not bring a car to campus that year, they get a bike, a helmet, and a bike lock, altogether worth about $400. The program is supported by college donors, trustees, and alumni, and the college got discounts on the equipment from Master Lock and the Trek Bicycle Corporation, which is based 60 miles south of Ripon.

The college also hopes that more bikers will help rejuvenate the shopping areas of the town of Ripon. Best of luck to students biking during those Wisconsin winters!

Today's Architectural Record covers the Association of College & University Housing Officers–International's (ACUHO-I) “21st Century Project” which investigates college and university housing for students from the present to 25 years in the future. The winning design, “net+work+camp+us,” from a group with Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, uses prefab units to build adaptable residence halls that can be altered easily for changes in population and even climate.

And since the social networking generation and Millennials are so closely wedding to technology and socializing online, these new halls will include "LED panels on the exterior walls of student rooms, for instance, would allow occupants to customize portions of the building facades according to their personalities....In the courtyard, an oversized LED monitor displays student announcements, class schedules, and even the whereabouts of individuals."

Click through for more images of the winning project. the 21st Century Project continues next year.

Grist, a great resource for environmental news, has released their list of the "Top 15 Green Colleges and Universities." Topping the list is the tiny College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, that has only one major, human ecology--or "the study of our relationship with our environment." However, there are several large, traditional schools on the list as well. The Dirt is not surprised that neither of his alma maters made the cut, but invites you to click through and see how your school did!

Now here's a cool idea: the American Architectural Foundation has an initiative running called "Great Schools By Design." As part of the initiative, they've teamed up with Target to hold a design competition called "Redesign Your School." The contest is for high school students to "rethink, redraw, redefine and revolutionize how your generation learns." Winners of the multimedia contest can receive up to $10,000 in scholarship money (and Target gift cards, of course). Click through to the contest site; entries are due by June 30.

Once upon a time this Dirter was a high school teacher who spent most of his days in a double-wide trailer classroom parked behind the gym on a slapdash concrete pad. The trailer (known officially as either a "mobile classroom" or even a "learning cottage"!) was drab, dark, cold in the winter, and hot in the spring and fall. To get to class, students had to walk a circuitous path around the school's HVAC systems and loading dock. The classroom wasn't pretty, and it didn't help to create what's called in the business a "positive learning environment."

These types of temporary classrooms are both all too common and all too permanent a fixture of overburdened school systems across the country. So what to do with these apparently necessary evils blighting school and college campuses? Project Frog is offering what might be a better mousetrap. Its light-filled, low site-impact, and low-VOC prefab classrooms are customizable, scalable, and can even be combined to make larger learning spaces.

An important question for LAs working on school, college, and university planning is how to compensate for the need for mobile classrooms. Will school populations continue to grow? What's the long-term strategy for housing students? Or should school and campus design as a whole be reanalyzed ?

From the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yale's president outlines plans to make the university the greenest in this Newsweek article via Archinect.

The Dirt loves the potential smell of green campuses competing to achieve the deepest shade of carbon reduction.

Check out a new report on sustainability practices of 100 of the nation's universities here for some context - linked through Gristmill.

For giving credit where credit is due.

In early November, The Dirt reported that several, shall we say, well-known landscape architecture firms and architecture firms were teaming up to compete over th right to redesign the main campus of Rutgers University. The star power the Scarlet Knights had managed to amass left us breathless, but there was one firm, Enrique Norten's TEN Arquitectos, which was not listed by Rutgers as collaborating with a landscape architect. Last week, when The New York Times reported that TEN Arquitectos had won the competition, it initially failed to mention that a landscape architect was involved with TEN Arquitectos, but later amended the story online to note that that the firm was "teaming up with Wallace Roberts & Todd" on the project.

But it took our BFFs over at ArchNewsNow to finally inform us--and set the record straight--that "Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos, and Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, ASLA, of Wallace, Roberts & Todd, will lead the initiative to redesign the historic campus. Other team members include Pasanella + Klein Stolzman + Berg, Arup, and Green Shield Ecology. We also understand that Norten and Bunster-Ossa are good buds and have been looking for a project to collaborate on for awhile.

Maybe it's the fact that their football team is in the top 15 of all the major college football polls, or maybe it's their hot New Jersey location, or maybe it's the 50,000 bucks, but whatever it is, some serious talent has been selected as finalists in a competition to redesign Rutgers College Avenue. The final five teams--Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners; Eisenman Architects/Field Operations; Morphosis; Antoine Predock/Olin Partnership; Ten Arquitectos (Enrique Norton)--presented their plans for the campus at a public meeting this week, and had a lot to say about how they envision campus buildings working with the landscape--The Daily Targum has the coverage.

The Predock/Olin team told attendees the main focus of their design was that proposed new buldings work with the landscape. "We see architecture and landscape as needing to be intertwined, one informing the other," Cindy Sanders, ASLA,  a principal with Olin Partnership and Rutgers alumna, said. "We want to minimize and obscure the boundaries between architecture and landscape."

Eisenman/Field Operations expressed similar sentiments during their proesentation, with Eisenman saying, "We believe that great campuses are remembered by great spaces, not great buildings. That is why we did not give any priority to great buildings, but to great spaces."

Game on!

Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Online reports on the plans for the new Gates Center for Computer Science, noting that Ralph Horgan, vice-provost for Campus Design and Facility Development, feels the landscape plan by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., "exceeded the planning committee’s expectations." The landscape plan will expand the planned green space from 52,209 to 120,100 square feet, and will include a winter garden, several groves of trees, green roofs, and recreational patios. The landscape will also incorporate a natural "multi-level stormwater management system," complete with rain garden. Curiously, MVVA has also included a volleyball court in the design. Curious, that is, for anyone who doesn't know their is a pretty competitive volleyball player at MVVA.

The Gates Center blog has more on the landscape--including  plan.