The Princeton Campus Plan: Challenges, Successes, and Lessons of Implementation

Fall 2009 Lecture Series
Department of Landscape Architecture

Natalie Shivers, Associate University Architect for Planning, Princeton University

Wednesday, October 28, 3:55, 110 Cook Douglass Lecture Hall

The Princeton Campus Plan: Challenges, Successes, and Lessons of Implementation

The talk will focus on the Princeton Campus Plan, completed in 2008, one of the most comprehensive plans ever developed by Princeton University. The University's major planning challenge is to accommodate growth on the diminishing available land on campus in an integrated and holistic way that respects and reinforces Princeton's defining characteristics as a university and a community. Created by architects and planners Beyer Blinder Belle with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and other consultants, the plan views the campus as a web of interconnected systems and makes recommendations regarding policy, architecture, infrastructure, landscape, and the environment. The talk will also look at the plan one year later and evaluate how it has survived challenges of fiscal constraints, design changes, community concerns, and institutional practices.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Natalie Shivers is the Associate University Architect for Princeton University and managed the campus planning effort for Princeton, working closely with Beyer Blinder Belle and its consultants on the development of the campus plan. She is currently working on implementation of Princeton's campus plan through public approvals of various aspects of the plan, as well as the development of specific projects. Previously, Natalie was director of campus capital planning at the University of California-Los Angeles where she oversaw the development of strategic master plans and coordinated their implementation in the design and construction of new buildings and renovation projects on the historic 419-acre campus.

A graduate of Yale University, Shivers earned her master's degree in architecture from Princeton. She has worked in Los Angeles for several architectural firms and held positions at three entertainment corporations -- Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, the Turner Entertainment Group in Atlanta and 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles -- where she oversaw design, construction and rehabilitation projects at the studios. She also spent two years as an architect/project director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, DC.