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Urban campus sprouts from sand
By BARRY KLEIN © St. Petersburg Times, published November 26, 2000 TAMPA -- Jack Fernandez keeps an office in the same University of South Florida chemistry building where he began his teaching career 40 years ago. Back then, it was one of only three buildings on campus, he said. The other 800 acres consisted mostly of sand, uncovered walkways and an occasional parking lot. "On windy days, the sand would blast the paint right off your car," said Fernandez, a charter member of USF's faculty and now a professor emeritus. "It was hot and it was empty, especially at night. For a lot of years, the place really was kind of bleak." It still isn't Cambridge and forget about Stanford. It isn't even the University of Florida, which had the advantage of a 50-year head start on its Gainesville campus. But thanks to a building boom that has yet to reach its peak, the USF campus is starting to look, well, downright collegiate. Since 1996, the university has spent more than $100-million on new classrooms, laboratories, dormitories and green space on its north Tampa campus. Another $200-million worth of projects are under construction or in the design stage. "We now have a campus that invites people outside," said Arthur Guilford, chairman of USF's communication sciences and disorders department and a professor here since 1975. These days, however, Guilford is far more interested in the possibilities inside, especially as they relate to USF's new $25-million psychology and communication sciences building, which his department soon will inhabit. Finally, Guilford said, his faculty will have enough room to do their jobs properly. "We run a large speech, language and hearing clinic. We see up to 300 patients a week," he said. "But there is so little space, we have to treat some people in the waiting room. And try doing acoustic analysis when the walls in the room don't even reach the ceiling." Like many at USF, Guilford gives much of the credit for the university's facelift to Steven Gift, the architect hired five years ago to bring coherence to a 30,000-student campus long derided as "Drive Thru U." Gift said it's easy to fault the people who designed the campus in the late 1950s. He does it himself, referring to their style as "bad modernism." But those early planners did several things right, he said. They chose colors and materials appropriate to the semitropics. And they built quickly -- 5-million square feet of academic space in less than 40 years. "Unfortunately, when you move that quickly, you don't always move very thoughtfully," Gift said. That may explain why the early buildings were far apart from each other, practically inviting cars onto campus. No one has ever understood why so little provision was made for shade trees or green space. Gift said he has focused on both of those failures in recent years. One method is through what he calls "infilling," which involves placing new buildings between the older ones. That creates a more dense, connected environment. "It's much more user-friendly," Gift said. "And it allows you to build courtyards and quadrangles, which help bring students together." But as the campus has become more urban, open spaces have become more critical. Gift said that's why he is working to build a greenway across the entire campus, and why he created areas such as the Martin Luther King Plaza, a campus oasis that attracts hundreds of students every day. Such gathering spots were nonexistent for much of USF's history, said Fernandez, who remembers how students in the early years would bring their lunch to school, then retreat to their cars to eat it. "What I remember is how few students ever got to know each other," he said. "There was no place for them to get to know each other." USF officials are careful to point out that the construction boom extends to the St. Petersburg campus, a message, no doubt, to state legislators who may soon consider whether to make that branch independent. The $5-million Florida Center for Teachers, a combined effort of USF and the Florida Humanities Council, is going up in the heart of the St. Petersburg campus. The $12-million Children's Research Institute, built by USF and All Children's Hospital, opened earlier this year a few blocks away. The boom, in fact, really is a statewide phenomenon, said Carl Blackwell, the university system vice chancellor for administration and finance. "The last several years have been relatively good for us in terms of construction money," said Blackwell, pointing to the more than $800-million in projects currently under way at Florida's 10 universities. But there still is a lot that isn't getting done. Most years, Blackwell said, the university system gets less than half the money it requests. Despite all the recent bustle, Gift said, that also is the case at USF. "We have 600,000 square feet of unmet space needs, and I don't think we're going to catch up any time soon," he said. Then there is parking, probably the single biggest source of complaints at USF. There are 17,000 parking spaces on campus -- more than enough, Gift said, to ensure plenty of available spots at any given moment. The problem is, available usually doesn't mean convenient. But the only solution for that, Gift said, is to raise the cost of bringing a car to campus. USF is not going to build more parking lots; land has become far too dear for that. But Gift said the university would build more parking garages -- which cost five times more per space than lots to construct -- if users were willing to foot the bill. Gift isn't holding his breath. "People would much rather complain than pay for the level of convenience they say they want," he said.
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