Making History

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Creating Connectivity, Collegiality & Cohesiveness on Campus

For every visionary proclaiming an esoteric and lofty plan for the Mission Bay campus, legions of faculty and staff are rolling up their sleeves, digging in the dirt, figuring out how to transform these seeds of prophecy into a reality.

The three tenets that make UCSF the unique institution that it is — connectivity, collegiality and cohesiveness — have been critical to this process as it has progressed. These principles, together with the acknowledgement of the surroundings, form the core of the master plan for the Mission Bay campus. Connecting researchers, clinicians, staff and students in a meaningful way is a hallmark of UCSF and one that has been paramount in planning for the campus.

Faculty Input

Faculty have been involved from the very beginning — defining programs that will populate the campus, how those programs will interact with ongoing and newly developing programs at Parnassus, and all the way down to lab and building design," says Keith Yamamoto, chair of the Mission Bay Task Force and vice-chair of the chancellor’s committee on academic implementation. "Like many things at UCSF, it's been a bottom-up planning process that has involved the faculty all the way through."

The task force, a 44-member faculty committee established in December 1996 by Haile Debas, dean of the School of Medicine, was charged with proposing the organizing principles for Mission Bay. After the first programs that will move to Mission Bay were chosen, Yamamoto, as a member of the academic implementation committee, worked with faculty subgroups in conjunction with architects to plan the lab space and overall layout for the first research building.

"We changed the basic footprint of the building in response to faculty concerns about the overall layout," says Zach Hall, vice chancellor for research and chair of the academic implementation committee. "It's a building that was designed from the inside out."

The Mission Bay project manager met with 26 UCSF groups a minimum of three times each to discuss the plans, Hall says.

"There were really quite a large number of people who put their collective wisdom into the design of this building," says Hall, who adds that this process is beginning again with the second research building.

Yamamoto, chair of the department of cellular and molecular pharmacology, says UCSF is unlike any other academic institution in that it is "led by people who place a very high value on the overall community and on talking with each other." This emphasis on collaboration is the central theme of the faculty's input.

"We realize how much we have gained from the interactions fostered while being jammed together at the Parnassus site," Yamamoto says. "The challenge is to find ways to maintain this coherence and cohesion even at separate sites. A lot of energy is going into making sure we have mechanisms for that."

The fruit of the intense partnership between faculty and architects is realized in the lab designs of Building 24. Some examples of faculty design ideas that will be implemented in this building are:

• The basic floorplan is modeled after the very successful design created by UCSF scientists for the Health Sciences East and West towers on Parnassus. Faculty offices are located in clusters, at the center of the laboratory space and adjacent to an interaction space.
• To maximize interaction, meeting rooms are scattered throughout the building, and attractive, open public spaces are planned along the spine and around the main auditorium or lecture hall.
• The labs will be located on the building's perimeter, letting in sunlight, and support areas will be located in the interior. Labs are designed to be flexible to allow for special research needs and future change.

Staff and Student Input

UCSF staff and students have also participated on several Mission Bay planning committees.

The Chancellor's Mission Bay Committee on Operations & Services, which includes staff and students, has been leading the charge, tackling issues such as parking, transportation and food services.

"We have roughly 20 working members on the committee who provide support services to research and clinical enterprises on campus and keep the campus fueled and operating," says Victoria Fong, co-chair of the committee and special assistant to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance.

Fong and committee co-chair Colleen Nickles say that planning services for a new site is a "wonderful opportunity," which has already spawned invaluable byproducts, such as successful collaboration among departments that have never worked together before. This sense of teamwork should result in better services for everybody at all UCSF sites, Fong says.

New ideas for Mission Bay include providing virtual services by using the University's computer network to deliver information. The committee is exploring the ideas of using kiosks to make virtual services available to everyone and building an Internet cafe, where people could have a cup of coffee and check their email and the Web, too.

"Because we won't necessarily have every department, such as accounting and human resources, physically represented at Mission Bay, we'll be relying on the network and shuttle system to move ideas and people back and forth," says Nickles, director of administrative coordination & business planning.

Transportation, which is already provided by a network of shuttle buses that makes 11 stops linking UCSF sites throughout San Francisco, is a significant concern. The committee will conduct studies to assess how adding another site will affect transportation, as well as housing, needs. The studies will also factor in the use of public transit.

Transportation is also important to the quality of campus life, providing faculty, staff and students access to recreational and conferencing facilities, as well as events, such as brown bag lectures and musical programs, which now mostly take place on Parnassus, but will become available at Mission Bay in the future.

"It's not just physical space we're planning but also making sure that the work environment is supportive for the faculty, staff, and students," Fong says.

Planning for the campus community center, to contain a café, fitness center, conference center and more, was the task of another committee, co-chaired by Debas. "This building will be the heart of UCSF and we hope will become a central meeting place for our faculty, staff, residents and students from all campus sites," he says. "We have taken great care in planning this building to ensure we solve once and for all the needs of our students: health services, student aid, lockers and other student services."

Some students have organized themselves to address critical issues.

A group of graduate students outlined a number of concerns from transportation, to safety, to housing in a 1997 letter to the chancellor. "It was, in fact, a very early and important guide in our planning process," Hall says.

A more recent forum put the architects and planners of the first research building in touch with the needs of disabled faculty, staff and students. The UCSF Disability Interest Group (DIG) met with planners in early March and voiced concerns over access needs that are not automatically addressed by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Architects and planners say they will heed the group's recommendations on a number of issues, including equipping the first floor lobby restrooms with automatic door openers.

Source: Paula Murphy

Last updated March 1999