UNIVERSITY EAST MASTER PLAN, Austin, TX
Design Director with Gensler
Master plan to transform a 1.1-million-square-foot parcel at the east edge of a private university into a net-zero-energy model of low-impact planning and design. The site is heavily wooded, hilly terrain located between the interstate and a creek and zoned by the city for mixed-use development. A conventional approach might raze the site to make it as flexible as possible for construction. Yet, the creek watershed is a sensitive ecological area that the city calls “a jewel of Austin” for its natural, historic, and cultural value. The challenge was to create a model of low-impact development that improves the economic yield for the university while preserving the ecological conditions of the site as much as possible. The building footprints sit only on areas of land that are relatively fat or already open. We developed a customized script to analyze the topography, which created the irregular pattern of ellipses. We overlaid this with sun and wind conditions to optimize the building shapes for passive design (light and air) while preserving the existing treeline and watershed.