The College is in the process of planning the next seven years of campus design and construction, and students, faculty and staff were asked for their input. As the 2018–2025 Campus Master Plan comes to an end, the multi-year process of developing the next plan began in July but is not set to be fully released until October 2025. However, campus input has already begun.

From October 21 to 23, the design firm Ayers Saint Gross, who is consulting on the campus plan project, hosted hour-long discussions about specific aspects of the campus plan. These sessions were advertised in the Student Digest in early October and open for registration on Campus Groups for groups of 20, drawing mostly faculty and staff.

“There was a majority of faculty involved in the classroom discussions. We had a session on museums and collections that was a mix of faculty and staff. Students attended some of these. I think ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of getting feedback from a variety of voices across campus,” Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer Matt Orlando said.

These hour-long sessions separately covered museum and collection spaces; libraries, collaboration and study spaces; classrooms and teaching spaces; research and teaching labs; visual and performing arts spaces; and academic support and student success facilities.The discussions were accompanied by open forums held in Moulton and Thorne, where students could more casually express their preferences about the campus plan by tagging what areas they wanted to see emphasized.

Yanevith Pena ’25 attended one of the sessions on research and teaching labs to voice ideas and issues she had concerning the layout of the current lab spaces. Among the attendees were professors from various departments, lab instructors and other staff members. Together, they listened to the leaders of the session and responded to their guiding questions on the topic.

A prominent idea was how the structure of the lab spaces can influence departments to collaborate with each other. For example, the interdepartmental space-sharing of Roux and Mills allows for professors from different departments to interact. Reformatting the lab spaces to mirror this would encourage discussions and collaboration across disciplines.

“Future spaces and renovations should include well-designed spaces with students and research capacity in mind given the uniquely large number of students that stay on campus during summers to do research, as well as spaces that allow more collaboration and interdisciplinary work in line with our liberal arts curriculum,” Pena wrote in an email to the Orient.

Ayers Saint Gross will present the results of these sessions to the steering committee assigned to developing the campus plan in the next week, according to Orlando, thus beginning phase two of plan development. During phase two, the steering committee will compile the primary goals of the campus plan and bring those plans to the Board of Trustees meeting in early February.

The campus plan will set the expectations for renovation and new construction over the next seven years. The previous campus plan had an estimated $165 million budget that relied on capital project donations and the endowment. According to Orlando, the budget for the upcoming plan has not been decided yet, but there is an expectation that a plan with a similar budget would not achieve as much development because of inflation and increasing construction costs.

“We like to think big and bold at Bowdoin. The last plan in 2017, the economics were a bit different. Prices of construction were cheaper. Interest rates and borrowing costs were low for the new phase back then,” Orlando said. “I think there’s going to have to be some built-in flexibility based on resource constraints. Also the sequencing with, if you take one building offline for a year, where do those people go and what do the students do for that year?”

Orlando also commented on how projects like the decommissioning of Pine Street Apartments,  a goal in the last campus plan, are continuing to be pushed and discussed in the new campus plan.

“Pine Street is still out there as an unsolved question. You can imagine if we are to attempt anything with respect to residence halls then having a little excess capacity will help because you take a building offline, you need those beds. A place like Pine Street may very well come in handy to stay online for at least a few more years, but I don’t know for sure yet,” Orlando said.

The College will source input from the campus community about the campus plan’s content and goals after phase three of its development, which is anticipated to be in late spring. Orlando expects plan-specific sessions will be hosted in late April or early May.