News Release

UNC earns national award
for excellence of campus master plan

CHAPEL HILL – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has won a national award for excellence in the planning and architecture of its campus master plan.

The Society for College and University Planning and the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on Architecture for Education have awarded UNC the 2005 Excellence in Planning and Architecture Merit Award in Planning for an Established Campus.

The juried competition recognizes collaborative state-of-the-art planning and emphasizes excellence in higher education environments and settings. UNC received the award in connection to the development of the 2001 master plan and the progress that has been made over the past four years in implementing it.

In its comments, the award jury said it "was impressed at how much has been accomplished on this project. The setting is very complex and the proposals rise to the occasion."

The award was presented earlier this week at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

At the university’s Board of Trustees meeting on Thursday (July 28), Chancellor James Moeser congratulated a planning team that involved hundreds of people from the campus and wider community in a three-year effort begun in 1998.

UNC won the award in conjunction with Ayers Saint Gross, the Baltimore architectural firm that helped orchestrate the process.

Moeser singled out the following university staff for their leadership during the ongoing process of development and implementation: Bruce Runberg, associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and construction; Anna Wu, director of facilities planning and university architect; Linda Convissor, director of local relations; and Jonathan Howes, the chancellor’s special assistant who chaired the planning process.

Howes accepted the award along with Luanne Greene, a principal with Ayers Saint Gross, on Sunday (July 25).

Howes said the jury gave equal emphasis to both the quality of the planning found in the master plan and the pace of implementation.

"We had the good fortune of completing a master plan soon after voters approved the higher education bonds in November of 2000," Howes said. "When we started our planning process in 1998, we did not anticipate the bond issue, but when it came along and earmarked $510 million for Chapel Hill it enabled us to hit the ground running with implementation."

Howes said the jury was impressed by how the master plan sought to blend new buildings onto an historic campus in a way that added to its natural beauty rather than detracting from it.

But more than that, they were impressed with how effectively the plan has been used to guide perhaps the most intense period of development the campus has ever seen. Howes said part of the "complex environment" the jury recognized was the fact that the campus is closely surrounded by neighborhoods with concerns about campus growth that have to be addressed.

"We couldn’t have done the plan if we hadn’t done the groundwork beforehand with the neighbors who have been most affected by the development of campus," he said.

Note: Howes can be reached at (919) 962-1558 or jonathan_howes@unc.edu.

News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, lisa_katz@unc.edu