At Planning 301, the master planning open house in November 2014, Vice President for Planning and Facilities Robin Morey presented some concepts for university’s master plan. Over the course of several blog posts, we’ll take a closer look at those concepts. You can share your feedback and ask questions in the comment section. You can also download the presentation from Planning 301 and read the feedback attendees provided at the open house.
The first post in this series explores the assessment of current space conducted by Sasaki Associates, the university’s master planning consultants. This analysis is newly released since Planning 301, so you won’t see it in that presentation.
In the first phase of the master planning process, Sasaki Associates collected data to better understand how faculty, staff, students, and others use the campus, and you can explore the results of the survey in greater detail. Sasaki also conducted an assessment of every space on campus. The results of that assessment, along with our planning principles, help inform the investments Georgetown will make for the future. The space assessment below shows classrooms, labs, study space, faculty and staff offices, general use space, and benchmarks against peer institutions.
General Space Breakdown
The chart below shows a breakdown of space on campus. The space includes 2.5 million assignable square feet (ASF), which is space that can be assigned a use. This chart excludes health care and residential space. There is about 5 million square feet of total space on campus.
Classroom Space
The image below shows the distribution of classrooms around campus. On all the maps, the darker blue colors correspond to a higher use. There are 163 classrooms on campus, comprising a little over 140,000 ASF. ICC, Hariri, Walsh, and Car Barn have the highest percentages of classrooms.
The following slides provide some benchmarking against peer institutions for classroom space on campus. The measure is assignable square feet (ASF) per student (FTE means full time equivalent). The first chart shows Georgetown on par with other universities, higher than some peer institutions and lower than others.
The second chart shows classroom hours in use per week, with a target range of 30-40 hours per week. Most of the classrooms fall in the target range, with some above and some below. The underutilized classrooms could be good candidates for modernization.
The chart below shows the hours in use per week of individual teaching labs on campus. The target use is 18-25 hours per week, and the colors run from green to red along that range. The data show that chemistry labs on campus are overutilized. As the university looks at new academic space, flexible laboratory space will be a top priority.
Study Space
Sasaki Associates also examined study space on campus. The char below shows close to 200,000 ASF of study space on campus, with the majority of it in Lauinger Library. A couple caveats on these data: the assessment was done before the Healey Family Student Center opened, and the assessment included as study space some study rooms and lounges in residence halls.
Again, benchmarking against other universities, Georgetown is on par with our peers and toward the higher end of the spectrum.
Office Space
The assessment of office space includes faculty and staff offices on campus. The data show a little over 3,000 offices comprising approximately 400,000 ASF.
The benchmarking data show Georgetown in the normal range with our peers and at the higher end of the spectrum.
General Use Space
General use space is space for co-curricular use, social life, or other non-academic use. There is over 300,000 ASF of general use space on campus, with high intensity use in the Leavey Center and O’Donovan Hall. As with the study space assessment, this does not include the Healey Family Student Center, which is approximately 44,000 square feet.
The benchmarking here again shows Georgetown in line with our peers and toward the higher end of the spectrum.
Understanding the distribution and utilization of space is essential for guiding decisions about space priorities and the type of spaces Georgetown will need to create in the future. One idea for a new academic building includes flexible lab space that would allow a research team to use a space for the duration of a project, then turn it over to another team for a new project.
In the next post, we’ll take a closer look at a concept for a student life corridor along Tondorf Road that features a new academic building, student life space, new residential space, and a pedestrian-friendly boulevard.