Longwood’s New Campus Master Plan

Hello everyone,

Over the past 18 months, Longwood and New York-based architecture and planning firm Cooper Robertson Partners have been working together to develop a new campus Master Plan – a document that will set out a vision and articulate priorities for our campus and facilities through 2025 and beyond.

The planning team, led with exceptional dedication by Dick Bratcher and working in consultation with the Master Plan Steering Committee, has conducted nearly 100 meetings with groups of students, faculty and staff, as well as off-campus constituents in Farmville and across the region. What has emerged should be a source of tremendous pride and excitement.

Longwood’s new Campus Master Plan recognizes the foundational beauty of our campus and builds upon it, while suggesting creative solutions for those places that need improvement. The plan envisions truly great public realm spaces for our students and community – gardens, a new performing arts center, an expansion to Willett to create more academic space and a multi-purpose event center, and even urban baseball and softball parks that could help transform downtown. But its most distinctive feature is a commitment to using thoughtful planning and design to knit the campus, Moton Museum and greater Farmville more closely together – to create walkable, shared spaces that will attract more people to campus, and help Farmville reach its potential as a great college town.

These ideas were shared in campus presentations this past fall, which many of you attended, and were approved by the Board of Visitors in September. The work since that time has been mostly of a polishing variety. The printed plan will be published within the next few months.

Last night, Longwood was pleased to host a public reception at the LCVA, to mark the opening of an exhibit there that will showcase the plan and its major ideas. That exhibit will remain open until late January, and I encourage you to visit. In the weeks ahead we will be sharing more about the plan with alumni and others through social media and other means.

The title of the 2025 Master Plan is "Place Matters." The name applies both to Longwood and Farmville, and is testament to the central idea animating this and all of our work here: that for all of the flux and change underway in higher education and indeed our world, the core Longwood experience of camaraderie and living and learning amongst one another remains a thing of unsurpassed value and importance. This is a special place, and we must nurture it carefully for the far future. 

My thanks to the core group who worked so hard on this plan, to the faculty, staff and students on the Steering Committee, and to all of you whose questions, comments and ideas shaped it. This plan is truly the product of that collective wisdom and imagination. I hope you are as proud of it as I am, and as excited to continue building this place together.

Thanks, as always,

TR

Place Matters: After 18 months of work, community-focused Longwood Campus Master Plan emerges

 Farmville, Va.—Seamless walking and bicycle connections to a great college-town Main Street. Gardens galore. A new performing arts center on the edge of campus to serve Longwood and the region.

And down the road, maybe even downtown baseball—a Farmville version of Baltimore’s Camden Yards.

As Longwood University’s Master Plan takes its final shape, those are among the big ideas in a document that will serve as a guide star for campus development for the next decade and beyond. After more than a year of research and design work, including at least 87 meetings with constituents on campus and throughout the greater Farmville community, Longwood introduced the plan, titled "Place Matters: The Longwood University Master Plan 2025," at a public presentation and reception Thursday at the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts. An exhibit about the plan will remain open there to the public through January 24th, and a web presentation about the plan is available at http://placematters.longwood.edu .

"This plan is a bold vision for what is already one of America’s truly great college campuses, thriving alongside one of its great college towns," said Longwood President W. Taylor Reveley IV. "It is the product of hard work and careful deliberations over the past year, including a great partnership between Longwood and the Farmville community. This work will ensure Longwood’s sense of place—its classical residential campus situated in a beautiful and vibrant college town—thrives in the decades and even centuries ahead."

"During its master planning process, Longwood reached out to the town and the community for input and ideas," said Farmville Mayor David Whitus ’83. "It is exciting to see so much focus on the interconnectivity between Longwood and downtown. A great exchange of ideas has taken place and that conversation continues."

Longwood worked closely on the master plan with world-renowned New York-based architecture and planning firm Cooper Robertson Partners. The firm is a global leader in an approach to architecture and planning known as "new urbanism," which emphasizes walkability and connecting campuses more closely to their home communities.

"For us, it is always about creating a public realm that defines places and communities – where people can live, work, go to school, play and recreate without necessarily being dependent on the automobile," said John Kirk, Cooper Robertson’s lead partner on the project. "It is fundamentally about creating community. It was apparent from the beginning that Longwood’s leadership shared this bold vision for its master plan, so we were thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them to create it."

Longwood’s campus plan envisions several significant new public realm facilities that will benefit both the region and campus.  A new performing arts center, seating approximately 500 people for performances and providing a home for Longwood’s performing arts programs while serving as a cultural beacon for the region, would be located on South Main Street. An expansion to Willett Hall would create a multi-purpose space for university events, concerts and basketball games, while freeing up additional academic space in Willett.

The plan also envisions moving Longwood’s soccer, lacrosse and field hockey fields back from Johnston Drive to South Campus, where they can contribute more directly to the vibrancy of campus, while moving baseball and softball into new facilities downtown that would help galvanize activity and redevelopment.

"It’s exciting to imagine spring or summer nights at the ballpark in downtown Farmville, with families from throughout the region watching a Longwood game, or perhaps even a minor league franchise the community might attract," Reveley said. "These are big, exciting dreams for all of us to contemplate together."

The plan is based on the assumption Longwood will grow modestly in the coming years, to about 6,000 students, up from current enrollment of about 5,100. Growth will be achieved largely through improved retention and graduate enrollment rather than expanding the size of the freshman class. Longwood envisions maintaining the proportion of students who live on campus, so there should be some increased demand for both Longwood-managed housing and off-campus private housing, but the university’s essential scale will remain unchanged.

In addition to new facilities, the plan also envisions an array of improvements to other important spaces on campus: visual enhancements to the Curry and Frazer dormitories, appropriately scaled development to invigorate the Venable Triangle that connects campus and downtown, and a handsome and iconic pedestrian entrance to the north end of Brock Commons along High Street. For the south end of Brock Commons, Longwood is commissioning a new statue of its patron Joan of Arc. The new performing arts center would sit alongside a new parking garage, which could serve both campus and downtown Farmville.

There is also substantial attention to landscaping and gardening. SiteWorks, a distinguished landscape design firm based outside Charlottesville, led the plan’s development of a comprehensive landscape and gardening vision, identifying spaces on the central campus and around the Longwood Estate that could be transformed.

"The very best college campuses have not just beautiful buildings but compelling outdoor spaces that inspire those on campus, and attract visitors from the local community and beyond," Reveley said. "We’ll be putting a lot of emphasis on these spaces. By dint of its history, geography and inherent beauty, Longwood ought to be widely known and visited for its gardens. This plan will give us a guide to achieve that."

Longwood currently has a number of construction projects from the previous 2008 Master Plan at various stages of the design-completion and construction pipeline, including a new admissions office, student success center, academic building and university center.

The new plan also presents a range of options for the Longwood property east of main campus that currently includes playing fields and the Longwood Golf Course. The plan makes no recommendations as to whether to continue to operate the golf course, but lays out a range of potential long-term alternative uses, including as a botanical garden or arboretum with walking and biking trails. Cooper Robertson has worked closely on leading botanical gardens and arboretums nationwide, including the famed Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

The plan lays out a vision for the campus extending to 2025 and beyond, but there is no precise timetable and the order of potential projects will depend on many factors. No master plan is ever implemented precisely as envisioned on paper, and the new plan is designed for maximum flexibility.

While many of the ideas envisioned for campus itself will now become central planning priorities for Longwood, others are simply imaginative ideas for future consideration in partnership with the town of Farmville and other entities such as Prince Edward County and the High Bridge Trail. For instance, the plan suggests a number of ideas for improving the appearance and walkability of streets that surround the Longwood campus. These ideas include expanding sidewalks and bike lanes—including connections to the High Bridge Trail and the Moton Museum—as well as landscaping and cutting-edge ideas for improving traffic flow and parking efficiency.

"We had, quite literally, some of the world’s most accomplished architects and planners focused on and excited by our campus, and we were determined not to waste the opportunity," Reveley said. "We asked them to explore whatever ideas that came to them for consideration."

Longwood’s Board of Visitors approved the major concepts for the plan at its September meeting, and the final printed version, inclusive of detailed technical analysis, will be available this spring. The planning process also included substantial research and analysis in areas such as space needs and allocation, energy usage and sustainability, and parking and transportation.

Cooper Robertson’s John Kirk said the distinctiveness of the Longwood plan stems from several sources: its appreciation for what is already great about campus, its determination to build on that strength and its aspiration to contribute to a broader sense of community.

"The vision outlined by the University for the 2025 Master Plan was so bold in ambition, broad in its thinking and clear in intention that it was immediately apparent that only extraordinary planning and design would measure up," Kirk said. "With that bar set exceptionally high, and thanks to the collective efforts of many people, a great and transformative thing has been achieved."