|
This summer Georgia Tech rolls out a landscaping master plan to carpet the campus with green space and an eco-commons that includes a new water management system. "This campus will be a model for other urban areas of how you can have a quality environment in a dense urban environment," says Les Saunders, director of Capital Planning and Space Management. "Landscaping is the campus. Buildings grow out of the landscape."
Georgia Tech began as a forested stream. Atlantic Steel built mill worker housing on the future campus — the O'Keefe building was a high school and Couch was an elementary school. The stream was sealed over and incorporated into the sewage system.
Tech will go back to the future by recreating some of what was. The original stream can't be reclaimed, but another will be created over it — a physical virtual stream, if you will, running north/northeast past the Campus Recreation Center as part of an 80-acre eco-commons with footpaths, floodplains and ball fields. The eco-commons will be an outdoor lab for environmental sustainability and water management studies.
The master plan calls for dogwoods, redbuds, serviceberry trees and oaks flourishing throughout the green space. Perennial plantings will include Georgia natives such as blueberry bushes and autumn ferns.
The goal is to make Tech a part of, yet apart from, the city. It should have a distinct campus identity, despite being close to Atlanta's heart.
Landscaping architect Ann Boykin-Smith, integral to devising the landscaping master plan, says that consistent landscaping guidelines detailed down to how closely the monkey grass meets the sidewalks and how wide those sidewalks will be will weave uniformity into variety.
©2005 Georgia Tech Alumni Association
