Re-Planning for Ottawa University; A growing school needs more space

This week we're undertaking a design charrette in Ottawa, KS as a master plan for Ottawa University. OU is a small, but growing, college, and this plan is being done anticipating growth to about 1,500 students over the next decade. We're on a team with Gould Evans Associates. We'll try and post some images from the charrette later this week. The project is an update to a master plan we completed for the university in 2003. At that time, however, the university anticipated a size of about 750 students as a maximum student population. Now, with a new president and strategic plan in place, the campus is poised to grow to 1,500 students. This puts the previous master plan in a completely different perspective, as the facilities will have to grow well beyond the current capacity. So, we will be looking at long-term (and some short-term) solutions for residential space, academic space, parking/circulation, campus open space and more.

Gould Evans is developing a detailed residential program as well as a program for the Learning Commons (union, library and more combined). The effort this week is to coalesce most of the work into a long-term physical vision for the campus, and we'll then work out the details over the next month. The near-term goal is to start a first phase residential building in the next few months.