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Make No Small Plans
Focus Area Campus Planning & Student Life
Featured Projects
- Parochial Boarding and Day School Master Plan Austin, TX, United States
- State University Campus Expansion and Student Housing Merced, CA, United States
- State University Multicampus Master Plan San Antonio, TX, United States
Partnering campuses with communities
Our full spectrum of planning and design services distinguishes us from many other firms in the academic sector. Our clients benefit from our ability to provide this wide range of expertise to tackle the challenges facing educational institutions today. We provide the levels of interdisciplinary coordination, innovative thinking and responsiveness demanded of today’s complex and technically sophisticated projects.
Sustainability and resilience are also critical considerations in planning for campuses. Our work includes master plans for new campuses as well as designs for improvements to existing ones. We help institutions ranging from small and independent to large and public, from primary schools to universities. Each solution is based on the institution’s mission as well as the physical and cultural context of its location.
Our urban design and planning expertise make us specialists in issues associated with "town and gown" and we're able to identify strategies that are highly beneficial to each. In all cases, our work applies creative planning and design elements that contribute to student success and the attraction and retention of families, faculty and staff.
Services
- Academic
- Architecture
- Strategies / Analytics
- Building Sciences
- Planning / Urban Design
The art of engagement
The process of reaching consensus on the future for a campus is as important as the solution itself. A successful collaboration can build on community and create shared visions that will endure. Our engagement tools include online surveys, social media and meeting-based interactions where we facilitate discussions about issues, opportunities, visions and concepts. This approach leads to consensus for strategies and plans ultimately adopted.
Campuses that foster students' best lives
Evolving ideas about the nature, context and 24/7 characteristics of learning continually influence the planning of student life facilities. Residential, dining, recreation and social spaces have changed in response to student expectations. Programming, siting, planning and designing these spaces present unique challenges – and opportunities – for campuses. We are committed to identifying and understanding our clients’ needs and crafting our solutions to ensure students’ success.
Page supported The University of Texas at San Antonio in its ambitious new 10-year multicampus master plan designed to accommodate significant growth projections and to meet university president Taylor Eighmy’s mission to “solve society’s greatest challenges as San Antonio’s university for the world”. We approached the plan from a holistic perspective, examining social equity, resilience and community engagement and ensuring flexibility to accommodate cultural changes driven by technological advances.
Building consensus, driving decisions and expediting ideas
Our programming services include campus-wide space needs analyses, instructional space utilization assessments, classroom efficiency studies and planning-level building programs. Our work is based on rigorous analysis of data and continuous research on the most innovative teaching, learning, and student life environments. We employ sophisticated planning tools to produce results and visual communications to clearly share findings with decision makers.
Leveraging technology in proprietary tools
As a leading campus planning firm, Page has developed a program to address facility needs that can be aligned with visions for the development of capital improvement projects. Our process involves a detailed assessment of facility conditions and open space analysis, as well as significant community engagement. Page has proprietary tools to accomplish this such as our Discovery Survey, an interactive online platform that fosters engagement across a school community.
We implemented our Discovery Survey in our development of the St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Master Plan, which is serving as a guide to unite the school’s physical development over the coming years. Community response was outstanding; the tool gathered opinions of more than 640 people, 40% of them students. This data informed our campus plan which has a significant lens toward sustainability and stewardship of the ecological context.
Creating a healthy future today
Sustainability has always been a guiding force in our practice, and younger generations expect it to be part of the fabric of their lives. Our campus design work engages institutions to aggressively pursue goals such as triple net zero, carbon neutrality and sustainable operations through enhanced site and building design, multimodal access and efficient infrastructure systems.
Honoring legacy, campus character and evolution
Planning for an existing campus often involves balancing the need for growth with the celebration of established campus heritage and character. We seek to understand both the design merits of a campus, and the ways in which it will be used over time. With this approach, we refined the campus framework at Trinity University to address recently evolved considerations, such as minimizing traffic, while reinforcing the community’s vision of place.
Starting with a blank canvas
The planning and design of new campuses presents special challenges. A successful plan must establish a vision and character that will brand an institution in the short term and create cultural context for the future. Planning for a new campus is a cross-disciplinary exercise, blending an understanding of program, space, pedagogy and student life, with placemaking and conservation of resources.
At the University of California (UC) Merced Campus, Page was a part of the student housing team creating communities at multiple levels from dormitory rooms to community spaces and from pedestrian streets to large outdoor plazas. Page has extensive experience with mixed-use student housing projects, and this project includes retail spaces, academic classrooms and student-life programing within the ground floor of each building.
Engagement with outdoor campus environments
Landscape serves a crucial role in preserving our well-being and success, which is why it’s central to how we plan and design campuses. Campuses have traditionally leveraged the landscape to serve four important functions: ceremony, restoration, social interaction and play. These four landscape functions are present on any successful campus and are now more critical than ever as an essential antidote to today’s tech overload.
St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in west Austin is sited on a 370-acre site with dramatic topography and landscape surrounding its facilities. The school is seeking to respect the heritage and richness of its natural environment while raising the quality of its academic, student life and residential facilities. Large areas of the site will be preserved, while densifying the built areas of the campus as needed to retain the natural beauty of the campus.
Blurring the line between town and gown
Our work with campuses importantly engages the communities in which they are located and builds on existing ties. In the eyes of the community, a campus may be a mixed blessing, with impacts associated with traffic, parking or noise. At the same time, the benefits that a higher education, medical, or research campus can provide to a community are enormous.
We are acknowledged experts in community outreach and participation, capitalizing on our urban design and land planning practice spanning revitalization, transit-oriented development and public realm design (streets and parks). Utilizing a wide range of outreach and engagement tools, we work with community and campus constituents to find shared visions for the future.
We never stop reaching
- 19K STUDENT HOUSING BEDS DESIGNED AND PLANNED SINCE 2011
- 80 MASTER PLANNING PROJECTS FOR PUBLIC AND INDEPENDENT UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES AROUND THE WORLD
- #8 PAGE’S ACADEMIC MARKET SECTOR RANKED 8 OF 155 IN UNIVERSITY GIANTS BY BUILDING DESIGN + CONSTRUCTION IN 2020
Testimonial
It takes a community
“My colleagues at Page and I are motivated by the ideal of improving society’s quality of life through design by engaging people and organizations with their environment. We bring together divergent stakeholder ideas that promote curiosity and collaboration in our projects to inspire action and promote meaningful change.”
The University of Texas at San Antonio Master Plan
Awards
- Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) Award of Merit, Excellence in Planning for an Existing Campus
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