Date:    October 28, 2005

To:       Members of the University Community

From:   Karen Kavanagh

           Executive Vice President for Administrative Affairs

    

Re:      Pursuing a Design to Enhance the College Avenue Campus

I am pleased to inform you of Rutgers' progress in pursuing a "New Vision for the College Avenue Campus," a multi-year partnership with the City of New Brunswick to transform our most historic campus into one of the finest university campuses in the nation. Central to the vision is the conversion of College Avenue into a more welcoming, pedestrian-friendly public space lined with historic academic buildings and architecturally distinctive new features. The College Avenue project is part of a larger vision for improving all Rutgers campuses, which also includes the College Town project on the Livingston campus, the expansion of the law school building in Camden, and the construction of University Square in Newark.

Much consultation regarding College Avenue has taken place since the university and the city held initial public information sessions earlier this year. Rutgers has formed an Alumni Advisory Committee and a separate Campus Advisory Committee comprising faculty, students, and staff. Both have provided input on the vision, its implementation, and the vital need for funding.  Professor Richard Miller, chair of the Campus Advisory Committee, hosted a seminar that met several times over the summer and gave Rutgers faculty, staff, and students the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas about improving the project.

Guided by the insights gained from these conversations, Rutgers is conducting an international search, through a competitive process with public input, to select a firm to develop an innovative concept for the College Avenue Campus. We have sent a Request for Qualifications to 45 preeminent architectural firms, asking each to assemble a team of professionals with expertise in such areas as landscape architecture, urban planning, and transportation. We will interview up to ten of them, selecting five finalists by early December. We will ask the five finalists to prepare conceptual designs and provide each with a $50,000 stipend funded through the Rutgers University Foundation.

The Rutgers community and the public will have further opportunities for input at several critically important stages of the design competition, including an "immersion week" for the finalists in January and after the design proposals are submitted in March.

Following this second period of public comment, the university will—with the help of a blue-ribbon jury—select a design team in April 2006. The winning firm will be given the opportunity to develop thelandscape plan for College Avenue and to design a new, signature academic building on the corner of Hamilton Street and College Avenue.

The Department of Facilities and Capital Planning is managing the design competition with the assistance of K. Backus and Associates, a real estate consulting firm with extensive experience in working with universities on large-scale development projects.

The news release on the design competition is available at http://ur.rutgers.edu/medrel/viewArticle.html?ArticleID=4806 . As we move forward in transforming the College Avenue campus, we will continue to provide updates through the website http://collegeavenuecampus.rutgers.edu/. The participation of our university community is critical to the success of these efforts, and your interest is appreciated.