Integrated Campus Planning

Comprehensive Solutions for Today's Higher Education Challenges

As higher education confronts unprecedented change, campus planners are taking on the critical role of synthesizing an institution’s diverse spatial, fiscal, and physical development needs into a unified action plan. Integrated campus planning provides this comprehensive consideration of academic, financial, campus life, and facility issues. The approach helps facilitate a broad-based consensus for institutional goals and priorities, along with a rigorously informed understanding of how to realize them in a shifting educational landscape.

SmithGroup’s integrated planning and design services encompass campus master planning, district planning, facility master planning, and campus design guidelines, as well as space planning, programming and design for academic, research and healthcare facilities. This broader perspective for planning encompasses the critical performance, cost and constructability issues that need to be considered at the strategic level. This allows for the development of balanced, creative and implementable solutions that are responsive to each client’s unique mission and issues.

SmithGroup’s fully integrated practice also offers depth in all disciplines serving the built and natural environment, including architecture, planning, engineering (civil, structural, mechanical, electrical and plumbing), landscape architecture, urban design and environmental science. This provides the full bandwidth of knowledge and collaborative expertise required for contemporary higher education planning and design, and the ability to deliver comprehensive, integrated solutions for campus development.

Recently completed master plans for Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) and East Carolina University (ECU) exemplify the benefits of an integrated planning team and approach. Innovative energy and water use modeling and progressive stormwater design have helped IUB advance an ambitious new sustainability agenda for campus. At ECU, a uniquely comprehensive strategic review of all existing university plans and studies established complete alignment of base assumptions and goals as the first step in the overall master plan. In both cases, integrated planning has provided an invaluable foundational framework for guiding overall campus development.