Dave Munson is used to solving problems. That’s what engineers do. Now, as he approaches retirement after ten years as dean of the U-M College of Engineering, he thinks he has gotten a handle on a very big one. From the time he came to Ann Arbor in 2003 to chair the department of electrical engineering and computer science, he heard that the school’s home on North Campus was not as “exciting” as it could be.

“I was not surprised that some residents of North Campus felt that we have a less exciting environment than the Central Campus,” he says. “After all, if you are on Central you’re sitting next to State St. and all it has to offer. It was a tradeoff–lower people density and far less commercial and retail in exchange for more nature,” he reasoned.

The hilly terrain of North Campus is interspersed with modern buildings housing five of the university’s schools: Engineering; Architecture and Urban Planning; Art and Design; Information; and Music, Theatre and Dance. Yet so many of its approximately 900 acres remain undeveloped that planners estimate it can meet the university’s needs for the next fifty years–essential for an institution that continues to grow but has no more buildable land on Central Campus.

North Campus was not, however, a user-friendly place. First designed after WWII by architect Eero Saarinen, in an era where the automobile ruled American life, it gave little thought to the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists, and treated open spaces mainly as backdrops for building. Though the music school, designed by Saarinen himself, was elegantly integrated into its hillside site, many other buildings were plopped down on former farmland like houses in a 1950s subdivision. The lawns between them were fine for Frisbee but otherwise offered nothing to invite lingering or interaction.

Of the five schools, engineering is by far the biggest, with 9,700 undergraduate and graduate students. The other disciplines have an estimated 2,000 between them. So it’s no surprise that engineering gave shape to the open spaces of North Campus, grouping new buildings around a four-acre lawn reminiscent of the Central Campus Diag, complete with its own bell tower and carillon.

Now Munson is turning that lawn into a leafy outdoor room. The Eda U. Gerstacker Grove, named for the mother of the late Dow Chemical chairman whose family foundation has donated more than $12 million to North Campus projects, is scheduled for completion this summer.

The $6.9 million project is sculpting the formerly flat topography to create an elevated plaza, an amphitheater, and five large infiltration gardens that will retain storm water in a series of landscaped basins lit with LED lights. There will also be space for tents and food trucks; new crisscrossing walkways; a sand volleyball court; and an unusual swing set with a motion activator so the more it moves the more illumination it will generate. Invisible but at least as important to twenty-first-century student life is an improved Wi-Fi network.

“The amphitheater is not going to be a traditional amphitheater where benches sit empty most of the time,” Munson says. The custom precast concrete benches are a signature feature of the project. Assembled in parts much like Legos, the benches start as curbs defining the walkways, grow to full backs and then shrink down, offering many different ways to sit. Construction difficulties for the benches slowed the timetable for the Grove, which was originally scheduled for completion last fall, but planners felt they were critical to encouraging people to gather and engage with one another.

“I wanted topography unlike Central Campus, and we will have berms” to vary the elevation, says the genial, loose-limbed Munson, who regularly dresses up for Halloween celebrations and even sent out a Christmas rap video a couple of years ago to students and faculty that still draws hits on YouTube. He also wanted a lot more trees; the Grove will add 200 of them.

Munson describes the Grove as part of “a continuing conversation,” just one segment of a fluid long-range plan that will look more thoughtfully at how people experience North Campus. Going forward, planning “is not a question of whether we are going to build another building,” he says, “but rather a discussion of the look and the feel of the place.”

The spontaneity and community Munson envisions for the Grove is far removed from the experience of alums like 1991 engineering grad Patricia Na. She remembers North Campus as “utilitarian, not particularly inviting or pleasant. Nobody wanted to be there at night–because it was pitch black,” she recalls. “There were orange lights about twenty feet up that had an eerie glow, but they didn’t shine light down on the walkways, so you didn’t feel safe,” she says. “Dining hours at Pierpont Commons were limited. I often relied on vending machine food in the evenings because there was nothing else.”

Na’s North Campus experience reflected the unbridled optimism–and unanticipated shortcomings–of its postwar creation. In 1949, the regents authorized an initial purchase of eighty-eight acres of former farmland north of the Huron River. On January 17, 1952, newly appointed president Harlan Hatcher announced plans for “a new North Campus” that could help accommodate the 25,000 students he anticipated by the 1960s.

Saarinen, the first president of Cranbrook, was commissioned to develop the master plan. One of the most distinguished architects of the mid-twentieth century, he designed the residential colleges at Yale University, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and the TWA terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. Saarinen was completing work on the General Motors Technical Center in Warren at the time, and many critics have noted a striking similarity between it and his designs for North Campus.

In the years that followed, additional land was purchased, streets were laid out, and utilities were installed. Landscape planning called for an open setting of groves and trees to be interspersed among the yet-to-be-built buildings.

The first construction reflected �xADU-M’s involvement in World War II and the growing interest in the potential of nuclear energy. The Phoenix Memorial Laboratory and the Ford nuclear reactor were completed in the mid-1950s. Three more buildings opened in 1963, including Saarinen’s music school.

Fred Mayer, U-M planner from 1968 to 2003, likes to quote Richard Dober, a campus planning consultant in the Boston area who died in 2014: “‘If you don’t have an open space you don’t have a campus.’ There were discussions, even renderings of a central open space on North Campus, much like the central Diag. As buildings went up, the space became defined,” Mayer says. “What was missing was a comprehensive plan for developing it.”

In 1984, then-president Harold Shapiro asked for a new master plan in the anticipation of new academic buildings. He also set aside money to enhance the open space with trees. Over the next decade, another wave of construction completed engineering’s relocation from Central Campus. But though artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and designers shared the campus with the engineers, their paths rarely crossed. There was no epicenter where they could meet and connect.

Munson wanted to change that. “Each of the disciplines up here has a creative imperative,” Munson says–noting, for example, that engineers are strongly represented in both the marching band and the glee club. ArtsEngine, a program started in 2006, where faculty members of the five different units co-teach courses on creative problem solving, is one tangible result of this philosophy. So was the 2008 WorkPlay Competition, which challenged teams of students, faculty and staff to submit ideas to transform the North Campus environment.

Two winning teams were selected, and university landscapers and designers worked on their plans, but the planning committee felt more was needed. So Munson and university planner Sue Gott interviewed about a dozen design firms and in 2013 commissioned Boston-based Stoss to complete the innovative, environmentally friendly design they were seeking.

The urban landscaping firm’s other projects range from collaborating on a citywide planning framework for Detroit to the Huangpu Riverfront in Shanghai, China. Its work on the Plaza at Harvard, completed in 2013, was in some ways similar to the Grove project, turning a concrete overpass into a miniature park with a pavilion, trees, and sculptural benches.

Drawing on the ideas of Frederick Law Olmsted, the ninteenth-century pioneer of landscape architecture who created both Central Park in New York and Belle Isle in Detroit, Stoss chose design elements to be functional, not merely decorative. “For example, the Grove’s infiltration gardens will do the job instead of pipes for storm water collection,” says Stoss principal Chris Reed, who is guiding the design. “The seating arrangements can assemble people in many different ways.

“We didn’t start from scratch,” Reed continues. “We looked at the WorkPlay finalists’ projects, talked to students, and imagined the activities that would take place in the space. The idea of ‘play’ was very important to Dean Munson because the students work so hard in the labs and classrooms.”

Sue Gott was concerned about the student experience. “A college campus is mission driven,” she says. “The space needed vibrancy, a sense of place, and an opportunity to create memories. This is why we keep campuses and not only turn to learning online.”

When the university’s 43,000 students return in the fall, they’ll have new opportunities to create memories on North Campus. But another challenge remains. While the campus has given U-M room to grow, it also has fragmented the university.

As a student in industrial and operational engineering, Patricia Na had most of her classes on North Campus, but not all of them–and getting to and from Central Campus, two-and-a-half miles away, took careful planning. “I couldn’t schedule classes back to back,” she remembers. “The buses were good, but you still had to allow time to get there.” Keeping connected became even harder when the university purchased the Pfizer property on Plymouth Rd. in 2008. The renamed North Campus Research Complex has two million square feet of lab and office space, but it is quite a hike from the U-M Medical Center and Central Campus.

Mayer notes that as far back as the 1960s there was a path preserved in the North Campus master plan that could be dedicated to a more technologically sophisticated form of transportation like a monorail. Campus planners have been exploring innovative alternatives, including syncing the U-M buses with AAATA and the planned Regional Transit Authority.

Now, with the Grove becoming reality and more buildings in the pipeline (including a new robotics institute), Munson is playing around with possible solutions to the transportation problem. A study released in February favored light rail or bus rapid transit, but Munson thinks an elevated system is the answer. “That is many hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. “But we need a transportation system that is so much fun to ride that people would want to come. Maybe an all-�xADweather roller coaster?”

Growing Pains

While engineering dean Dave Munson reimagines the core of North Campus and contemplates an elevated transportation system, the existing intercampus bus network has caused tensions to flare between the university and its North Campus neighbors. In March, the U-M regents put plans for a new transportation operations complex on Green Rd. on hold, barely a month after the university initiated the process to obtain a state environmental permit for the project.

“We have no issues with the university developing this land, but they are planning an industrial facility in the midst of a residential neighborhood which will operate twenty-two hours a day,” says Kate Delaney, codirector of the newly formed Northeast Ann Arbor Community Coalition. The group, made up of five neighborhood associations, has been writing letters and holding meetings to present its concerns about potential traffic and environmental impacts. “We realize we have to be proactive,” says Delaney.

The fifteen-acre, $38.5 million complex would replace the current operations and maintenance facility on Kipke Dr. near the athletic campus. First approved by the regents in 2014, it would house about 235 vehicles, including sixty buses.

“One objective of establishing a new facility is to accommodate the planned purchase of articulated buses [longer vehicles] which will improve the capacity of each vehicle during peak hours,” says U-M community relations director Jim Kosteva, who has met with the coalition. “Bus operations serve university passengers twenty-two hours a day, and they are a crucial link between North Campus and Central Campus.”

After a contentious public hearing in March, residents in the Green Rd. area received letters from U-M president Mark Schlissel announcing that the university would suspend the permit application and reach out to residents to better understand their concerns. In a subsequent meeting in mid-April, Kosteva and university planner Sue Gott explained how the site was selected, but “we came away even more concerned,” says Delaney.

“The university is continuing to work along parallel tracks of reviewing and digesting the messages and calls we have received from neighbors while also stepping back to reevaluate the objectives and specifics of the proposal,” Kosteva says. “We are evaluating a variety of options.”