Cooper Union’s new academic building, designed to achieve LEED gold certification, occupies a prominent site on Third Avenue in Manhattan. (Iwan Baan photo)

Three years ago administrators at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art decided, along with their financial advisers, to “ratchet back the financial risk” in the institution’s investments, The Wall Street Journal says in an article today that describes how the college was able to afford a striking new academic building even though it charges its students no tuition.

Although many other colleges have seen the value of their investments decrease significantly, Cooper Union’s endowment is expected to amount to about $600-million as the fiscal year ends today — just about what it was this time a year ago, the newspaper says. The institution’s prize asset is the land underneath one of New York’s most prominent Art...

A recent entry on the Greening the Campus blog opens with a provocative question: “Would you wash your hands with a fire hose?”

Richard Johnson, director of sustainability at Rice University, discusses the problem of “over-designing” various systems in buildings, which leads to waste. His blog entry focuses on a heating-and-cooling system in a recently designed building on the Rice campus:

[The] engineering consultant originally recommended 2,000 tons of cooling. An internal team from Rice whittled this down to 300 tons of cooling — an 85-percent reduction. To date, the building’s actual consumption has not peaked above 40 tons, although it eventually will. The difference between the original recommendation and the actual peak from operations to date is a factor of 50. That’s over-design! As a comparison...

A monument by Santiago Calatrava has eight levels of moving stainless-steel ribs. (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology image)

This month the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, dedicated an unusual new campus monument by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who was recently selected to design a new building for the University of South Florida.

The monument, which is more than 90 feet tall, has an exterior made up of 224 moving stainless-steel ribs on eight levels. According to a news release from the institute, the monument was designed to have “a wave-like motion generated by the electric motor that sits atop the mast; each moving rib induces the sequential motion of the next, from the top level to the bottom.”

“The effect of this sinusoidal movement is an illusion of the whole monument rotating on its axis,” says the project manager, Michael...

Amid pressure from environmentalists and regulators, Northern Michigan University is dropping its plans for a cogeneration plant that would be partly dependent on coal, the Associated Press reports.

The 10-megawatt plant would have burned wood and wood by-products and used coal as a backup fuel, but the university asked the state to void its permit for the plant, the article says.

According to a news release from the university, the Sierra Club had been one of the lead groups opposing the coal plant.

The university will apply for a new permit for a plant that burns only wood. “We believe, once built, the cogeneration plant will result in significant cost savings to NMU and further the university’s sustainability efforts,” said Gavin Leach, vice...

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education has released its 2008 digest of campus undertakings in sustainability, which essentially collects the news items sent out in AASHE’s weekly e-mail messages. The 356-page document, which is available free online, covers education and curriculum, staff development, buildings, carbon-emissions programs, dining services, grounds, transportation, waste, and other areas.

A news release for the report ticks off some of the numbers from the past year: Almost 300 campuses signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, 130 green buildings were planned or built, more than 60 sustainability-focused academic programs were created, and 13 sustainability-research...

Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, calls for a reinvention of the liberal arts in this stirring talk at the 2009 TED Conference, which was recently released on TED’s Web site. She says the liberal arts should focus on broad subject areas relevant to the problems of today — health, equity, the environment, education, governance, and the uses of force — and colleges should re-engage the communities around them. Her vision shares much with that of some leading sustainability advocates.

The alternative, she explains, is irrelevance — or worse:

We have professionalized the liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has...

This has been a really unusual year for us. Ever since our first garden season in 2002 we have struggled yearly with drought. This year we have had lots of rain, and it’s been fun to watch how the garden responds. Crops are shooting up. We are harvesting tons of snap peas, a few zucchinis have appeared, and the pole beans are going wild. Garlic has been harvested, leaving room to plant winter squash.

Pole beans, May 18

Pole beans, June 16

Zucchini, May 18

Zucchini, June 16

Garlic, June 6

Harvested garlic, June 16

The evening of June 9 we had a huge hail storm. There was some damage, but not nearly as much as there might have been.

Hailstones on the deck behind my house

We started an experimental melon patch this year, and the melons love the rain (maybe that’s why they’re called watermelons). Tomato plants are already getting out of control, and some carrots and...

Bar code: Students drew inspiration from UPC symbols in designing shelving in the architecture school at the State U. of New York at Buffalo. (Photo by Doug Levere)

I took a recent trip to upstate New York to visit a few colleges, and I made a stop at the architecture school at the State University of New York at Buffalo. There, Brian Carter, the dean, has students working on what he calls “small projects” — efforts to redesign much-used public spaces, both to enliven the surroundings and to give students real training.

Mr. Carter, who is British, says there are many opportunities in Europe for young architects to participate in competitions and get their names out there. One of the difficulties of being a young architect in America is that there are too few opportunities to break into the field and show one’...

The City of Boston has approved Boston College’s $1-billion expansion plan, according to The Boston Globe. The city requires the college to start its projects with an undergraduate residence hall.

The expansion plan has been a sore point between the college and the neighborhood that surrounds it. (See articles here, here, and here.) Even after the plan was approved by the city,...

View Larger Map Washington U. in St. Louis will add wind turbines to this building near its campus. (Google Maps image)

Not everyone agrees that rooftop wind turbines are attractive additions to buildings. But Washington University in St. Louis is putting seven turbines on top of a renovated building in a historic district and making them an architectural feature by illuminating them at night, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The newspaper says the units, which won approval from the St. Louis Preservation Board, will generate “a bit of the building’s electrical power and also provide a distinctive sight.”

The project, designed by Trivers Associates, is a rehabilitation of a three-story building at the intersection of Delmar and Skinker Boulevards, near the university’s campus. The building will have 16 student apartments on its second and third floors. The original...