Community Engagement in Higher Ed
Lynn Student Center, Gensler
3) Landscape approach
Achieving a more sustainable campus
was not only a goal of the students and
faculty, university leadership also recog-
nized that it’s good business. We worked
with Lynn and their landscape architect to
develop a landscape masterplan to return
the plant material on campus to a native,
low-maintenance solution and implement
a 100% reclaimed water irrigation system
using city reclaimed water. There were 90
million gallons of drinking water saved at
the end of the first four years.
4) Renewable energy
We worked with Siemens to put a
new chilled water plant on campus to
serve future development and plan to
implement other innovative renewable
energy strategies in the future.
5) Storm water
Before we could proceed with any
12 essentials | winter 2019
new development, a storm water in-
frastructure plan — “The Lakes Mas-
terplan” — had to be put in place. An
unexpected result of improving these
lakes was a significant savings in mainte-
nance from turning them back to a more
naturally maintained ecosystem.
Lynn also set some aggressive
sustainability goals for themselves. We
were inspired by their goals and en-
courage all our master planning clients
to do the same. They set out to reduce
energy consumption by 70% against
a “business as usual” baseline, and to
do the same in a reduction of potable
water use and water used for irrigation
by 50% and 70%, respectively. Like-
wise, Lynn aimed at reducing solid
waste sent to the landfill by 20% while
increasing the selection of native and
adapted planting to a minimum of 30%
of all plants.
Lynn’s success in measures of this
nature were inspirational. Every year,
the university diverts a total of 11%
of campus waste through a growing
recycling program. Their reduction
in energy usage was so dramatic the
month after replacing gymnasium
lights with LED and adding occupancy
sensors that the power company came
out to see if something was wrong with
the meter.
When it came to further improve-
ments to physical infrastructure, Lynn
immediately focused on adjusting
storm water retention, energy usage,
upgrading campus infrastructure
and driving development and fund-
raising. One priority was the chilled
water plant. Multi-colored pipes were
used as a tool in educating students
about sustainability. The chilled water
infrastructure upgrade — along with
updates to electrical infrastructure —
saved four million kilowatts of energy
in the first four years of operation. That
is the equivalent of taking 589 cars off