Montreal — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened a global-education building last year that has helped to ground and unify the various international programs on campus, an administrator told a crowd at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference.

UNC has had aspirations for global education, but its international programs and departments were scattered and hidden all over the campus, said Raymond B. Farrow III, the executive director of the university’s Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the former director of development for international studies. The problem became apparent to Mr. Farrow when foreign dignitaries visiting the university had to be shuttled from building to building all day long.

The university decided to build a central home for international studies to unify the programs, and for the site picked a parking lot on an odd-shaped intersection, situated amid venerable and mediocre buildings.

Mr. Farrow hoped that the university would hire Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the architects who had designed the University of Pennsylvania’s Gateway Complex, a chiller plant that is surrounded by a perforated metal screen through which visitors can see the plant’s guts, complete with colorful pipes.

But Mr. Farrow says that trustees at the university, which has beautiful traditional architecture, were skeptical about putting a modern building on the campus. Mr. Farrow organized a walking tour of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where trustees saw traditional buildings next to modern ones, such as Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall at MIT.

“We learned in our walking tours that good architecture — and bad architecture — is not defined by styles,” he says.

The resulting building, which opened last year, features red brick to blend with Carolina architecture, but also a green roof and a large glassy facade. It is oriented around a central atrium that provides for serendipitous meetings between students and faculty members and also offers ample space for banquets. Classrooms in the building are open not only to international programs, but also to programs like biology and philosophy that might benefit from the international atmosphere.

Interestingly, the building features special storage for a set of Indonesian instruments called a gamelan.

Portland, Me.— On the University of Southern Maine’s Portland campus, construction crews are finishing a striking, glassy new building for the university’s Muskie School of Public Service and Osher Lifelong Learning Center.

Designed by Koetter Kim & Associates, the four-story building is expected to earn gold-level certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Among other features, it has geothermal heating and cooling—relying on wells drilled down 1,500 feet—and a vegetative roof from which excess rainwater will be collected for recycling. It is due to open later this summer.

The Moseley designers, Bryna Dunn and George Nasis, presented data on buildings at the College of William and Mary, Longwood University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Mary Washington. The building at Longwood was the highest-rated structure of the bunch, having attained LEED gold. In each case, Ms. Dunn and Mr. Nasis examined how the buildings had performed compared with the LEED projections for their performance, performance standards under the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and, if the project was a renovation, its pre-renovation performance.

In most cases, the new or renovated buildings met or outperformed the predictions and standards, the designers said, and any extra money laid out for LEED design will pay for itself within a few years. But there were interesting anomalies. For example, the building for the University of Mary Washington’s graduate college performed worse than the predictions and the standards from April to September. Why? The designers had specified a smaller chiller, but a larger one was installed. The university plans to replace the chiller, Ms. Dunn said.

Ms. Dunn also compared the energy use of the LEED buildings against the average building’s performance on each campus. But here, too, was a curious finding. Except in the case of Old Dominion, the LEED buildings performed at about the same level as the campus average — or worse. That was because most other buildings on the campuses had not been renovated, a step that would add electrical plugs, lighting, and air conditioning — a major energy hog. One paradox of campus renovation, well known among facilities managers, is that a renovated building will often suck more energy, even if it features energy-efficient technology.

But, Ms. Dunn said, such gauges were measuring only a building’s energy performance, not its water conservation, occupant satisfaction, or marketing value. Surveys of occupants have found that they were generally happy with the appearance and atmosphere of the building. But again, there was one compelling anomaly: Thermal comfort always rated poorly compared with other categories.

Ms. Dunn said that was probably because half of the people are too cold most of the time, and half are too hot.

Dartmouth College is planning to tidy up a messy corner of its campus by demolishing two buildings behind a heating plant and replacing them with a $52-million visual-arts center by the high-profile Boston architecture firm Machado and Silvetti Associates, The Dartmouth reports.

The project would create a striking new gateway onto the campus from Lebanon Street, a busy thoroughfare. The site is at back of the Hood Museum of Art, Charles Moore’s 1985 postmodern masterpiece, and beside the far reaches of the Hopkins Center, the college’s rambling performing-arts complex. That edge of the campus is currently marked by a jigsaw puzzle’s worth of parking lots and walkways. A blogger who writes about Dartmouth buildings identifies one of the structures being demolished as a former auto dealership whose main block dates to 1914.

Machado and Silvetti’s other campus building’s include Willard J. Walker Hall at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and a new entrance pavilion for Bowdoin College’s Museum of Art. For Dartmouth, the firm has designed a three-story building with a sleek facade of slate, stone, and glass.

Renderings of the design were released last week and quickly produced a minor tempest. A member of a town-college liaison committee, Marilyn Black, criticized the facade as “hideous” in an article in the Valley News that was picked up by several other newspapers. College officials responded that the building’s urban aesthetic is appropriate for the downtown location, and added that they were “not taking away some charming corner of Hanover.”

Construction is set to begin in September 2009 and to be completed two years later.

Higher-education institutions are often married to their pasts, but they are heading into a world with daunting challenges that will require students to think broadly, to think globally, Martha Piper, a former president of the University of British Columbia, said at an opening session. Ms. Piper said that she had visited the University of Oxford once while the venerable institution was in the middle of some strategic planning. An administrator there remarked that he hoped the planning would finally bring Oxford into the 17th century.

A big part of preparing students for a different world means educating them in sustainability, she said. The University of British Columbia has taken on a number of sustainability initiatives, including renovating buildings for energy efficiency and pushing mass-transit options. Students have been integral to the process, starting programs like a student bus pass.

The university is also internationalizing its dormitories. It formed partnerships with overseas universities in Japan, Korea, China, and Mexico, and built student residences that reflect the architecture of the partner institutions. Students there get an immersion in the culture and language of the partner institutions.

Ms. Piper borrowed inspiration from an official in Singapore, who said that she would urge her grandson to study languages, science and technology, and cultural and religious studies to prepare for the new, globalized world.

In thinking about the future, Ms. Piper reached back to the past—to a prescient statement made in 1946 by Lester Bowles Pearson, a prime minister of Canada and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Fear and suspicion engendered in Iran can easily spread to Great Bear Lake above the Arctic Circle in Canada and bedevil economic developments there,” she quotes. “There is, now, no refuge in remoteness.”

In the 1950s, Pearson anticipated the globalized world when he said that we are entering “an age when different civilizations will have to learn to live side by side in peaceful interchange, learning from each other, studying each other’s history and ideals and art and culture, mutually enriching each other’s lives. The alternative, in this overcrowded little world, is misunderstanding, tension, clash, and catastrophe.”

Ms. Piper said that if we don’t study each other’s history and learn to live side by side in a world that seems to get small and more crowded all the time, we will certainly see clash and catastrophe. “We don’t have another 50 years to act,” she said.

Marc Mayerson

I’ll tell you who: almost every American college and university from Cambridge to Berkeley.

I’ve seen it all. Art-Deco next to rustic. Italian-Romanesque Revival next to Industrial Modern. Greene and Greene tree houses next to Pop-60s moon bases. Geodesic domes with cobblestone walkways; neo-Moorish dorms overlooking antebellum administration buildings. Walk most any campus and you’ll see a patchwork of four, five, maybe six different architectural motifs, often slammed up against each other and separated only by thin strips of cement sidewalk (which, mercifully, is timeless).

One can almost tell the age of a campus by its architectural spread, the way one would read the age of a tree. Let’s take a look at Any Venerable University—AVU, for short. The core is traditional, borrowing from the past—grand, ornate, and European. Next comes a ring of the post-traditional—less ornate, possibly Deco. Then the War Years, traumatized and functional—think Quonset huts. Next the Fabulous 50s, when grammar schools, college libraries, and just about everything else ended up looking like automobile assembly plants. Then come the 60s—we were either living with the Jetsons or op-arting with London swingers.

The 70s brought us Roman Modern and the return to nature—Crosby Stills and Nash, and wood and glass. The 80s brought post-apocalyptic concrete, and the 90s unvarnished confusion. Now, in the 00s, we get crystal-meth-inspired ‘toon towns. It’s a mess, all right. The best of it is ruined by its proximity to the worst of it, and the worst of it jars the senses like a horsefly in the butter. Why do campuses see themselves less like homes and more like Disneyesque architectural theme parks? Over here, Tomorrowland; over there, Yesterdayland (Pssst, it used to be called Tomorrowland). But …

Before any of you get your mechanical pencils in a wad, I’m not advocating the planned-community approach, where the supermarket, the mortuary, and every other building look exactly alike. What I have in mind is simple aesthetic judgment. Brown shoes, khaki pants, pale-yellow shirt—that kind of thing. One would not make it very far as a landscape or interior designer without aesthetic judgment. Yet what we find on most campuses these days isn’t even a legacy of bad aesthetic judgment. What we see is no aesthetic whatsoever.

Why is that? Maybe campus architects are only concerned with the myopic task at hand and the fad-du-jour. Maybe college presidents are ill-prepared to orchestrate a coherent and sustained vision. Maybe shared governance precludes coherence and sustained vision. Maybe donors have too much power. Or maybe it’s just the hegemony of straight men. Whatever. I guess the next question is: What does it take to get a building torn down?—Marc Mayerson

Marc Mayerson, assistant dean of social sciences at University of California at Los Angeles, is the Buildings & Grounds guest blogger for July. You can read his previous posts here and here.

Canadians, who are sometimes ahead of Americans in their environmental sensibilities, have started looking down on bottled water—particularly at colleges. The July 21 issue of Maclean’s, the Canadian news magazine, says efforts to ban bottled water are starting up at the University of Manitoba and the University of Ottawa, among other places.

But here’s the curious thing: The Maclean’s article cites a recent report on bottled water by Statistics Canada, a government agency that tracks the Canadian population, its economy, and its culture. “The report found that nearly a third of Canadians use bottled water at home. This preference increases with income, suggesting it’s a luxury good. Yet curiously, the use of bottled water declines with education.”

In other words, if there is a bottle of water sitting next to your computer, you may be rich—and dumb.

The findings of the study were puzzling to those at StatCan, as the agency is sometimes known. The wealthy and the educated usually have parallel consumption habits, but apparently not in bottled water. “The greatest consumers of bottled water in Canada are those with substantial incomes but no more than high-school education,” Maclean’s said. “University graduates drank the least amount of bottled water in the country, regardless of income.”

Reusable vessels for tap water have had their own problems recently, particularly after Health Canada released a study in April saying that Bisphenol A—BPA, an integral ingredient in the plastic bottles made by Nalgene—may cause difficulties in the endocrine system. (Those Canadians—trouble for bottlers everywhere!) Nalgene—whose bottles at one time were seen stuffed in or hanging off of every student book bag—switched to a BPA-free bottle-making formula. Now, however, it seems that bottles by Sigg or Klean Kanteen are part of the paraphernalia of eco-conscious students.

Green plans: The Providence Journal features a round-up of green buildings that are “sprouting” in Rhode Island, at the University of Rhode Island, Brown University, Johnson & Wales University, Roger Williams University, and other institutions. The story notes that Rhode Island is one of the few states that has not yet established a chapter for the U.S. Green Building Council.

Meanwhile, the University of Louisville is planning an energy audit that will save the university $33-million by 2020. Siemens, which is conducting the audit, plans to trim 30 percent from the university’s $13.8-million annual energy bill.

Unity, Me.— Lots of colleges recycle buildings. Elegant old libraries have become admissions offices (Lebanon Valley College) and guest houses (Davidson College), while outgrown athletics facilities have been remodeled as academic buildings (University of Virginia) and recital halls (Bowdoin College). Harvard University has made offices out of part of an old utility plant, and Vassar College is in the middle of a project that will recycle an 1864 observatory to house its education department. But I can’t think of an institution besides Unity College that has reused chicken coops.

Unity, founded in 1965, occupies 225 acres that were once George E. Constable’s thriving chicken hatchery, and four of the big hatchery buildings, heavily remodeled, are still in use. North Coop houses administrative offices, including the president’s, while South Coop houses classrooms, faculty offices, and an art galley. Eastview and Westview are residence halls—unless someone told you they had once been poultry buildings, you’d never know. The Constable farmhouse now houses the college’s development office.

Given Unity’s focus on the environment and sustainability, recycling buildings makes perfect sense. The dining hall that links the North and South Coops, by the way, recycled the solar panels that Jimmy Carter mounted on the White House roof while he was president. They stopped working a few years ago, but they’re interesting reminders of the federal government’s policy shifts over the years.

The former chicken coops are not, alas, particularly attractive. Much more appealing is a circular rock garden with Stonehenge-like features that was constructed in 2006. In the center, benches are arranged around a yin-yang symbol, while plantings set the garden off from the surrounding lawn. The garden is known, appropriately enough, as “Unity Rocks!”—Lawrence Biemiller

“Unity Rocks!” is a small but idyllic landscape feature near the center of the campus.

The rock garden was constructed just downhill from Unity’s library.

Unity, Me.—Unity College, which calls itself “America’s environmental college,” is building its president a house with a small footprint and big ambitions: to earn the highest possible LEED certification and to serve as a model for sustainable homes everywhere.

The 1,900-square-foot house will have solar panels on its roof and is designed for a net-zero lifestyle—sometimes it will draw power from the electric grid, but what it draws will be balanced by power it contributes to the grid at other times. The house has significantly more insulation than traditional homes, and it is being constructed on a concrete pad that will retain heat in the winter and help keep the house cool in the summer.

South-facing windows and sliding doors with screens—all featuring triple-glazed, argon-filled glass for extra insulation—will admit plenty of daylight and, in good weather, fresh air. Low-flow water fixtures, compact fluorescent lights, and high-efficiency appliances and mechanical systems round out the plan. The house is expected to earn platinum-level certification from LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Unity’s president, Mitchell S. Thomashow, and his wife, Cindy Thomashow—who is executive director of the college’s Center for Environmental Education—have not had a campus residence until now, although Mr. Thomashow has been president for two years. When the house is completed next month, they’ll spend much of their time in a large living area divided from the kitchen by a counter. On one side of the living area, a movable wall will set off a den that can double as a guest room. On the other side of the living area, small offices for both of the Thomashows separate it from a bedroom.

The architect, Hilary B. Harris of Bensonwood Homes, says the house was designed to be as flexible as possible. The Thomashows wanted it to accommodate college events and classes—Mr. Thomashow plans to teach a freshman course there this fall—but not to feel cavernous when just the two of them were at home. Also, the house was designed to show that a comfortable, sustainable home could be built on a fairly tight budget, about $200 per square foot. “We felt that was competitive for the American homeowner,” Mr. Thomashow says.

Although it won’t look like a modular home, the house has been largely manufactured at Bensonwood, which is working with the college and with the Open Prototype Initiative, started by an architecture-research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The kitchen and bathroom modules were built at Bensonwood and trucked to the site, and structural members and wall panels were cut at the company’s facility and brought to the campus ready for assembly. Locating bathrooms and the kitchen together on the north side of the house allowed Ms. Harris to keep all of the structure’s mechanical systems in a single area and to limit excavation to one long, narrow crawl space.

Ms. Harris and Mr. Thomashow say the budget prevented them from adding some features they would have liked. A green roof over the offices and bedroom proved unaffordable, but the roof the house was built with is strong enough that plantings can be added later, if money becomes available. Mr. Thomashow also wanted composting toilets, but they would have required a lot of additional excavation—a costly prospect because the house sits on a rock ledge.

The house is located a few hundred yards from the main part of the 600-student college’s campus. It sits across from a pond and beside a field where the college’s team of woodsmen practices. The landscape plan calls for shade trees, vines on trellises on the south side of the house, and edible landscaping on the north.

Mr. Thomashow, a longtime environmental scholar and author who drives a Prius, says he’s looking forward to living in the house and seeing how close he and his wife actually come to a net-zero life. At Unity, he says, “we describe our approach to sustainability as real-time, frugal sustainability“—and he’s about to become a poster president for that frugality himself. Ms. Harris has warned him that even though he’s a serious athlete, he won’t be able to take two showers a day.

What he’s really worried about, though, is how much power his two synthesizers will need—he doesn’t want to pit interest in music against his commitment to sustainability. But finding answers to questions like that is part of living in a house that’s also a demonstration project. “We really aspire to broaden the constituency for conservation” at Unity, Mr. Thomashow says. “We want to be an exemplary sustainable college.” —Lawrence Biemiller

The house as it appeared Monday from the other side of the pond. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

A rendering shows the house with its solar panels installed, giving it the appearance of having a traditional roofline. (Unity College image)