Bennington College Adaptive Framework Plan

With student housing at capacity, Bennington College needed strategies to accommodate growth while remaining committed to the stewardship of a 600-acre campus whose rural and secluded character remains one of its most treasured assets.

In the basement level of an administrative building on the Bennington College campus on a crisp September afternoon, a 6-person design team sits down with the college Director of Growth and Development, a small camera crew, and an untouched box of donuts. Plans of the existing campus and historic photos are spread out on a table as the team nervously awaits a barrage of students on their lunch hour to come sit down and share their vision for the Bennington campus of tomorrow. Our design team and the school had been preparing drawings and probing questions for weeks and we were eager to meet with those most affected by changes.

Two students sit down, having seen a poster advertising free food. No additional students show up. Where do we go from here?

Engagement

What happened next surprised our design team. The Director, recognizing the challenge before us, slowed down the project timeline to develop an engagement strategy that would include everyone—staff, faculty, students, alumni, and trustees. Framing opportunities to better connect and utilize all campus facilities, including the entirety of the college’s landholding, the planning team identified six key elements around which to organize these structured conversations: Movement, Living, Landscape, Learning, Sustainability, and Recreation. The College hired a dedicated intern and we set out to build new engagement infrastructure, a pipeline for ideas and critical feedback.

These 6 key elements helped organize small groups running conversations with College leaders, staff, student body, and community members from both Bennington and North Bennington, Vermont. Throughout Fall and Winter sessions, dozens of students, staff, and faculty participated in weekly meetings organized around specific topic areas such as housing, recreational space, academic space, and growth. This input and feedback, obtained primarily through in-person and virtual events, yielded design principles for approaching each of the elements. A robust short-answer survey captured over 10% of the campus with written responses about campus values and hopes for the future.

Recommendations within every element saw critical roles for landscape, from opening up clearer circulation on foot, making spaces for connections between students and the land, conserving habitat, and enriching its ecological function for campus waterways.

Integrating Feedback

Looking beyond the bounds of the campus, the team heard robust feedback about ways to link the College to resources around and mutually support adjacent communities. North Bennington seems physically distinct today but easily accessible with greater walking, biking, and potential direct shuttle connections through the north gate. Providing electric bicycle access on campus could also shorten the perceived distance from grocery and shopping venues recently linked through an extensive local bicycle network.

Incremental Growth

Straddling the towns of both Bennington and North Bennington in rural Vermont, the institution grew incrementally, first by shaping facilities from their site’s agricultural and Beaux Arts estate legacies. Later investments produced modernist works and campus patterns that proved difficult to reconcile. Today, Bennington College hosts a diverse population of students from around the country and the globe on an equally diverse campus landscape.

A Roadmap for the Future

The Adaptive Framework addresses growth in the context of the college’s unique cross-disciplinary living and learning within a Vermont landscape. It provides many possible futures/pathways for the growth and development of the College, recognizing how changing internal priorities or changing external conditions might inform decision-making down the road.

Recommendations within every element saw critical roles for landscape, from opening up clearer circulation on foot, making spaces for connections between students and the land, conserving habitat, and enriching its ecological function for campus waterways.

Campus Circulation

The first campus-wide framework that emerged from this study related to the balance between the north and south campus, breaking down distinct program clusters which have developed over time. Through creation of a more accessible and activated circulation connection– or“spine”-- at the western portion of campus, growth can support and break down these divides physically and programmatically. Increased mixed-use programming within and across buildings and spaces is key to supporting cross-disciplinary learning and the overall Bennington mission.

Campus Precincts

From a larger landscape lens, the north and south “imbalance” of the present-day campus also represents an experience of the landscape with distinct precincts. There is a high utilization of the campus core at the south, but minimal usage of trails and other campus landscape.

Thinking of the entire landholding as the campus landscape, programs from housing to academic to wellness uses can link to the environment and support the varied ecosystems on campus.

Life on Campus

We are at a pivotal moment in the ecological life of the campus. In many ways, Bennington College has been at the forefront of sustainable maintenance practices, eschewing traditional landscape management practices in favor of adapting the campus to its context (examples include forgoing irrigation, regenerating meadows, and performing manual invasive removal instead of chemical). However, its management and maintenance must continue to improve and adapt or it will not survive as we have known it for the last hundred years. 

Issues of aging woodlands, decreasing plant diversity, increasing invasives and deer browsing, and the pressures of a warming climate threaten this resource. Important ecologies are aging without a reliable way to renew. With 9 distinct ecological typologies and numerous distinct “character zones” within, the campus is a precious habitat for plants and animals. With 440 acres overall, of which 128 are forested and 105 are fields, it is also critical infrastructure for climate change readiness, with the power to contribute to flood management and water quality benefits, to capture carbon and mitigate warming.