Honor Award

Celebrating the Cultural Landscape Heritage of Mills College,
Oakland, CA

Robert Sabbatini, ASLA, Karen Fiene and Vonn Marie May, San Francisco, CA
client: Mills College

Project Statement

How do campus planners identify which historic resources are valuable for guiding campus improvements and use the resources in sustainable new designs?

Since 1868, Mills College founders, and those who followed, shaped the campus with Picturesque-era exotic and native plantings and distinguished architecture. In 2006, Mills College sought guidance on how to best preserve, enhance, and further develop this unique campus setting. Funded by the Getty Foundation and Mills College, this landscape heritage study distills the values of the college founders and how these were expressed by nationally recognized landscape architects and architects over 140 years.

The project singles out iconic resources and recommends how to balance future development with historic preservation. The project included historical research, analysis, and planning, and it culminated in design solutions for two key campus precincts to address current and future needs. The study demonstrates that the use of historic resources is integral to sustainable planning and design. The public lecture series, integration of the study into college courses, and publication of a book increased awareness and excitement about this study's findings and recommendations. The result is a campus environment that expresses the unique identity of the institution.

Project Narrative

Sense of place

• This cultural landscape heritage study defines the essence of the campus identity as manifested in its physical and cultural characteristics.
• Research identified distinctive features of the cultural landscape created by distinguished professionals in architecture, landscape architecture, and botany, including Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Walter Ratcliff, Jr., Howard Gilkey, and Howard McMinn.
• The study guides development within and beyond the historic core of the campus.

Sustainability

• Building on the contributions of past planners and designers is fundamentally sustainable in approach and outcomes. This plan advocates taking cues from and making use of historic campus resources. Often, colleges and universities sweep aside historic resources, wasting the potential physical and cultural contributions they offer.

Resolution of Conflicts

• This study sets out to resolve conflicts between the demands of a 21st-century education and the cultural historic values of the institution.
• As a case in point, the college recently removed more than 100 blue gum (120 years old, 120 feet high). The double row of Eucalyptus was a historic iconic edge to the original campus. Because of the college's depth in horticultural and biological sciences, college faculty advocated the use of native plants to replace the Eucalyptus. This clashed with the cultural history of the college. Recommendations of the landscape heritage plan balanced and resolved the issues and convinced the college to replant the Eucalyptus but with a different species. Just as the founders did more than 100 years ago, the college is currently growing the trees from seed for planting in Fall 2009.

Research, Community Outreach, and Education

• The college conducted a series of four well-attended public lectures. The presenters placed Mills in the national context of the development and evolution of women's college campuses and discussed research on the development of the Mills campus over 140 years.
• The college integrated this study into two undergraduate courses to further appreciation of campus history and its biological setting.
• For the `board of trustees, the study offered insight into the power of the campus to instill a sense of place and fueled enthusiasm to pursue improvements identified in the project's design studies.
• Recognizing the wealth of historic research and its usefulness in informing future campus planning and design, the college published and distributed a well-illustrated book (rather than a planning document) to educate the campus community and to support fund raising for capital projects and landscape improvements.
• The book documents the planning and design steps undertaken, providing a process that can be easily transferred to other institutions.

Implementation

• Mills College is taking its first step in implementing this study, demonstrating that the past can inspire the future. Mills recognized that support for historic resources is often tested when action needs to be taken. Therefore, the college chose a study area that had immediate needs and presented conflicting values. The college used this study to resolve the issues and will replant the double row of Eucalyptus trees in Fall 2009.
• The study demonstrates that high-quality campus design can be achieved through restraint. The simple, yet bold, replacement of the double row of Eucalyptus, the extension of native plantings to create an aesthetic campus context to the buildings, and the use of finer textured materials in areas of high pedestrian use all contribute to success of the guidelines. Exemplary architectural achievements from campus history inspired the study's simple materials palette, ranging from scored, poured-in-place concrete for pedestrian areas to the shuttle stop's metal work, which is inspired by the shape of the blue gum Eucalyptus leaf.