Emory Campus Master Plan: History

Woodruff Philanthropy	During the 1970's, Emory University was to benefit from the generous philanthropic endeavors of the Woodruff family. As early as 1958, the Woodruff family had shown interest in Emory. The Woodruff Memorial Building for medical research, adjoining Emory Hospital, was dedicated in memory of Ernest Woodruff the father of Robert W. Woodruff. Robert W. Woodruff had attended Emory College, at Oxford, and during the 1920's had taken over the helm of the Coca-Cola company. Robert and his brother George were to become Emory's most prominent benefactors, in 1979, by establishing an endowment of $105 million. Because of the continuing generosity of the Woodruff family, their name appears on many of the university's buildings: The Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center Administration Building (1976, Heery and Heery, Architects); The George W. Woodruff Physical Education Center (1983, John Portman, Architect); George and Irene Woodruff Residential Center (1987, Aeck Associates, Architects). Two other significant buildings in the arena of medical research were built in part due to the support of the Rollins family: The O. Wayne Rollins Research Center (1990, Rosser Fabrap International, Architects and Engineers) and the Grace Crum Rollins Building (1993, Lord Aeck Sargent, Architects).
The Carlos Hall Renovation	Other significant additions to the Emory campus in the recent past include the renovation of the Lamar School of Law, one of the buildings designed by Hornbostel . Between 1984 and 1993, the Princeton based architect, Michael Graves, designed an addition to the Hornbostel building and renovated the existing structure. Renamed Michael C. Carlos Hall, the original building and its addition now house the Emory University Museum of Art and Archaeology. Graves' addition was sited on the cross-axis of the quadrangle. With the new wing of the museum in place, it is no longer possible to approach the campus via the sequence intended by Hornbostel. Graves, however, did anticipate the need for pedestrian circulation on site and provided for a loggia on the north side of the building to facilitate movement on foot. Despite the somewhat radical reinterpretation of the lines of movement on the quadrangle, the Graves building does indeed attempt to hearken back to the character of the original university buildings. A compatible gray and peach marble is used on the new building and allusions are made to the detail and character of the Hornbostel buildings. The interiors of the museum are probably among the most successful aspect of the building and constitute some of the most memorable interior spaces to be found on campus. Graves designed the exhibit spaces to evoke the time-period of the art objects displayed within the building. Stenciled plans of temples from antiquity are a quotation of similar bronze-inlaid designs that grace the floors of the Art and Architecture building designed by Henry Hornbostel at Carnegie Mellon University. Also notable additions to the campus are the William R. Cannon Chapel (1981, Paul Rudolph, Architect) and the R. Howard Dobbs University Center (1986, John Portman, Architect). The later building is conceived of as a large scale addition to Alumni Memorial Hall which preserves the façade of the existing building as a feature of a covered courtyard-like space. The firm of Scogin, Elam and Bray were engaged to renovate the Clifton Court Apartments, renamed Turner Village in 1989. In addition to the renovation of the housing units located in this area of campus, the Scogin firm designed a new community center and chapel, the D. Abbot Turner Center, which might be seen to represent an expressionist counterpoint to the historically referential museum building designed by Michael Graves..
Land Becomes Scarce	As development on the campus continued through the 1990's land on the Emory campus became a premium. Sites which would have traditionally been thought of as unbuildable, such as the ravines that skirted the quadrangle, now became locations for library and hospital expansion projects. Site areas with significant slopes, that would have been thought from the outset of the campus design to be undesirable for new construction, out of necessity became locations for new buildings. Additionally, the programs of new facilities seemed to grow in both area and physical dimension from their predecessors. New building campaigns featured construction that would provide sometimes two to three times the amount of floor space that the original campus buildings would have housed. Thus the intimate scale quality displayed by the pre-war buildings was lost to mammoth buildings which exuded a more corporate and impersonal scale. The buildings of this time period also grew in physical dimension in comparison the buildings already in existence on campus. A typical pre-war classroom or research laboratory building would measure between 60 and 75 feet in depth in order to accommodate a central corridor lined by occupiable spaces to either side. Since it was incumbent to provide light and fresh air to the spaces on the interior of the building, the 60-75 foot dimension represented a comfortable and workable size for accomplishing this performance criteria. With the advent of modern heating, ventilating and air-conditioning systems, the necessity to keep buildings within the range of a 60-75 foot dimension was no longer necessary. Thus, many new buildings began to utilize larger depth dimensions to efficiently accommodate the activities contained inside. While the larger floor-plate buildings may have been of benefit to solving problems of building usage, they do tend to sever the relationship between the occupant and the exterior landscape. Theoretically, once the design of a building becomes preoccupied by the activities accommodated on the interior, the ability of the design to respond to the contingencies of the exterior may deteriorate. Such is the case with many of the new buildings on the Emory campus. The pre-war campus buildings attempt to accommodate the internal activities specified by their programs while simultaneously responding the contingencies of their context. The forms of many of the post-war campus buildings appear to be the result of a design process that became preoccupied with the problem of solving the functional requirements of the program while neglecting many of the salient aspects of the building's context. Thus, many of the post-war buildings fail to adequately contribute to a comprehensive vision of the campus -- each building presents a unique visual essay unrelated to its neighbors. Lastly, Hornbostel, in 1915, could never have predicted the impact of the automobile on campus design. Since the 1970's parking has become a preoccupation on many college campuses, and Emory is no exception. Numerous parking structures have been sited at various locations around the Emory campus. Some of the parking decks are more successful than others in integrating with the surrounding environment. The need to think of parking as both an architectural and environmental problem that can be solved within the bounds of a comprehensive plan for growth will no doubt mark the next stage of Emory's growth.