Cooper Robertson unveils campus facilities plan for University of Maryland

Following an 18-month group engagement and planning course of—involving 6,000 factors of enter from over 1,000 college students, school, employees and group stakeholders—Cooper Robertson has launched its campus amenities plan for the College of Maryland (UMD) at Faculty Park. The plan, Cooper Robertson says, alerts the establishment’s dedication to holistic development.

Towards that finish, the Cooper Robertson plan options new educational, residential and leisure amenities lined upon signature new inexperienced areas and pedestrian thoroughfares together with a brand new Innovation Stroll. A 5-mile walking-slash-bike path via nature can be a part of Cooper Robertson’s design; it meanders on and off the campus. The plan additionally proffers enhancing multimodal transit circulation and making the most of 5 new metro stations slated to quickly open.

“This plan builds on the College of Maryland’s function as an bold, forward-looking, and value-driven educational establishment,” stated Mike Aziz, a associate at Cooper Robertson and UMD alum in cost of the grasp planning effort. “By embracing its legacy of distinction in a contemporary and strategic program, the college is setting a extremely sustainable and lasting directive for the last word success of at present’s and tomorrow’s college students.”

The College of Maryland at Faculty Park, a land grant faculty, was based in 1856, and sits on 1,340 acres simply exterior Washington, D.C. A hearth in 1912 destroyed a lot of the unique campus, which was later restored in 1938 by then UMD President Curley Byrd, a staunch segregationist. Faculty Park’s most central constructing is Morrill Corridor, a Nineteenth-century edifice by Henry B. McDonell which was the one constructing left untouched by the 1912 fireplace.

Now, present UMD President Darryll J. Pines is wanting towards the longer term. Below Pines’s management, UMD’s Clark Faculty of Engineering ranks within the prime 10 record in conferring essentially the most levels to Black college students. Cooper Robertson’s grasp plan at UMD proffers a strategic imaginative and prescient for a way UMD can develop its Faculty Park campus because it turns into an “more and more numerous” establishment, the architects say.

“Our Campus Amenities Plan is greater than only a blueprint for improvement; it’s a dedication to our college‘s holistic development,” Pines remarked in a press release. “This imaginative and prescient, fueled by enter from our numerous group, signifies our dedication to creating environments the place each scholar can thrive, study and lead.” The complete UMD Campus Grasp Plan will be discovered right here.

The grasp plan additionally identifies alternatives for UMD to improve its present amenities to fulfill its sustainability objectives, amongst this reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2025. It likewise reveals how UMD can higher hook up with its surrounding group.

For Cooper Robertson, the UMD venture builds upon the agency’s demonstrated observe document with reworking school campuses. Beforehand, Cooper Robertson has labored with Georgia State College, George Washington College, College of Delaware, North Caroline State, Ohio State, College of North Carolina, Cal Tech, Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, the Duke College Medical Faculty, and different schooling establishments.