Student Group Pushes for more Recycling

BY: MEGAN MILSTEAD

OCT. 25, 2007

158 million pieces of paper. 2.5 million aluminum cans. 2.8 million plastic bottles. According to Miami Recycles’ Web site, Miami University students, faculty and staff have recycled enough trash to prevent more than 21 million tons of greenhouse gasses from escaping into the atmosphere since January 2003.

But despite the university’s efforts, which created a recycling program in 1990 and has steadily improved it since then, some feel more can be done.

Student group Green Oxford (GO) has a mission to increase environmental sustainability in the Miami and Oxford communities. President Cortney Schiappa said a committee is working to find ways for Miami to improve its recycling practices.

“We don’t think it’s good enough,” Schiappa said. “If you’re going through all the effort to recycle you might as well go all out.”

As part of its initiative, GO splits recycling into three categories: indoor on- campus, outdoor on-campus, and off-campus.

Kay Reichenbach is the GO member in charge of indoors, on-campus recycling. She chose this focus because she wants to see the changes she made.

“I felt like recycling on campus was where changes would actually be visible,” Reichenbach said. “I don’t want to be in a club just to go to meetings. I want to feel like I’m accomplishing something.”

Reichenbach is focusing on plastic to-go containers such as those used at Uncle Phil’s Deli and Bell Tower, and napkins use at dining halls. In the past, the plastic containers have been a No. 6 or 7 plastic, while Miami can only recycle Nos. 1 and 2. The napkins are also non-recyclable.

Jon Brubacher, manager of food purchasing at Miami’s Culinary Support Center, said that within the past year Miami has attempted to make the jump to recyclable plastics.

“We’ve switched the vast majority of our plastic containers,” Brubacher said. “We’ve used from probably well over 1,000 of those clamshells [the No. 6 plastic container] a week down to maybe 200.”

Along with napkins, other items are on the recycling radar for Brubacher.

“We are open to anything,” Brubacher said. “We’re looking at different napkins. I have a couple different types of cutlery on my desk right now.”

Unfortunately, new environmentally friendly products such as silverware are still evolving, he said.

“Six months ago quality was terrible,” Brubacher said. “The only thing going for it was that it was silverware.”

Cost is also an issue. The first round of silverware, made from corn starch, cost nearly three times the price of the plastic cutlery now in use. The price of a second round of silverware has dropped to two times the price. Competition among companies will help make recyclable silverware and other food service supplies a reality, Brubacher said.

“More and more companies are getting into environmental products and the more companies there are, the better it is for everyone,” he said.

Off-campus recycling, meanwhile, may be harder to increase. While homeowners who have trash pick up from Rumpke can request a recycling bin for free, apartment dwellers cannot.
According to Amanda Pratt, communication manager for Rumpke Recycling, the company has a contract with the city of Oxford. Landlords must go through the city to obtain a recycling container. Schiappa hopes to hold an informative landlord luncheon at the beginning of the spring semester with a representative from Rumpke to better inform landlords about recycling.

Contamination of recycling bins is another challenge to increasing city-wide waste reduction.

“It’s a universal issue,” Pratt said. “Any time there’s a recycling drop box people see it and think they can put anything in it.”

While such containers can still be sorted, they require more time and manpower—which could end up costing more money and energy to complete the recycling of a contaminated bin.

Because of setbacks like that, educating students and Oxford residents is the key to successful recycling, Pratt said.

“It’s building awareness about recycling,” Pratt said. “It’s getting landlords to buy into having a container somewhere on their property.”

Brubacher agreed participation is crucial.

“We have a pretty good recycling program but it’s like any program—for it to actually work people have to participate in it,” he said.

Schiappa said students especially need to understand how recycling works.

“We need to make sure we inform them to use [recycling] correctly,” Schiappa said. “Even in the dorms when it’s provided, people don’t use it.”

As part of their own education, members of GO recently toured Rumpke Recycling facilities in Cincinnati.

“We wanted to educate ourselves so we could educate other people,” Schiappa said.

Despite its critics, Miami’s recycling center has attracted significant attention. It began a program called Recycle Mania in 2001 with Ohio University. The event tracks the amount of recycling at each participating school over the course of 10 weeks. From its humble beginnings, Recycle Mania has exploded into a competition among 201 schools this year. According to Recycle Mania’s Web site, the schools recycled 41.3 million pounds of waste in 2007. Miami’s contribution to that was an average of 66.2 pounds of garbage recycled per student.

Pratt agrees Miami’s recycling is on the right track.

“You guys have a great program at Miami,” Pratt said. “It’s one of the best in the area.”

Students Design for Wright Homes

Images of the Fallingwater furniture proposals provided by John Reynolds

BY MEGAN MILSTEAD

NOV. 6, 2007

Balanced on the edge of a natural waterfall, the nearly camouflaged walls of stone and beige concrete appear to grow out of the sandstone and surrounding forest. The setting sun is reflected in the mirror-like windows that face the beauty of the Pennsylvanian mountains. The house, named Fallingwater, is a Frank Lloyd Wright design considered a leading example of organic architecture. Visited by approximately 140,000 people a year, the house has been named one of the 12 landmarks that will change the way you see the world, America’s most favorite historic home, and a building of the century among other accolades. It is also where Miami University architecture students have been both inspired and inspiring for the past four years.

Miami architecture professor John Reynolds launched the Fallingwater work at the invitation of Cara Armstrong, a former student and the curator of education at Fallingwater.

“Be kind to your students because you never know where they’ll end up and they may end up giving you a job,” Reynolds said.

The Beginning

Armstrong had a vision to make the house more accessible to the public.

“I’m interested in how people and museums can be more inclusive and used for more interactive experiences beyond a house tour,” Armstrong said.

The first Miami graduate students who worked on the house, in 2003, benefited from this inclusiveness by designing furniture for Fallingwater’s Servant’s Sitting Room, now used as the tour guide break room.

According to Troy Lowell, one of three students who saw the furniture project through to completion over three years after graduating from Miami, visitors and tour guides to Fallingwater are not allowed to touch anything in the home.

“It’s so homey that you want to [touch things],” Lowell said. His design for the seating area sought to make the tour guides “…not feel so separate from such a warm environment.”

Armstrong said she liked the attitude Miami students brought to Fallingwater.

“They were more about understanding Fallingwater but not about, ‘How can my work be a part of Fallingwater,’ ” Armstrong said.

Lowell said that this philosophy comes from Reynolds’ teaching.

“Our challenge was to extract the DNA of the site and build from that,” Lowell said.

That required walking around the home and property, observing the wind and sun, sketching the structure and grounds, and generally getting a feel for how the home was built and constructed. It is an organic, evolutionary experience for the students who tease out the miniscule details of a building like scientists decoding the secrets to human life.

The Present

Bill James, a Miami student who is currently working on Fallingwater in an undergraduate studio, uses the same process.

“It’s made me a lot more careful in how I approach a site before I just plop a building down on it,” James said.

James and fellow students are creating master plans for the renovation of a farmstead adjacent to Fallingwater as well as working with a second Frank Lloyd Wright home called Westcott.

“We started at the very small scale with the furniture, then at the level of the landscape and now at the scale of the individual homestead,” Reynolds said.

Three Miami architecture studios have worked with Fallingwater since the initial project. The second looked at how to restore and extend the programming of the farmstead itself. The third explored more of the 4,000 available acres of land and the possibility of bringing in new housing. The fourth and current studio is bringing all these ideas together in a master plan to develop housing prototypes for the 19th century farmstead.

The students are in the process of securing funding for the six housing plans. Armstrong said Fallingwater hopes to expand its educational and residency programs, but needs more space to do so.

As far as real experience goes, Reynolds said the students are in the middle of a wonderful opportunity.

“Students are excited because they see themselves engaged in real world projects. They’re seeing real outcomes,” Reynolds said. “They don’t have to wait for permission. They don’t have to wait to graduate. Their work has real meaning and value now.”

Though James’ studio has undertaken a large project, he feels that the house has many opportunities, big and small.

“I think anything associated with Fallingwater is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.

Lowell, who now works as a mechanical engineer and also has an architecture license, said that working with Fallingwater impacted how he approaches projects and other aspects of his career.

“It has changed the way I do things,” he said. “It has changed the way I interact with the owner, architect and engineer. I see the benefit of communicating across the board.”

Current Miami students, meanwhile, are honing their communication skills in a second Frank Lloyd Wright project, the Westcott House in Springfield, Ohio. Armstrong made the project possible by introducing Reynolds to Marta Wojcik, curator of interpretation at Westcott.

While the Westcott House has worked with some student groups before, Miami’s students have taken their work with the house to a new level, Wojcik said.

“We never really had a class dedicated to our house, our museum,” she said. “The amount of time they are spending on it is really amazing.”

Similar to Fallingwater, the Westcott House is hoping to expand and reinterpret its facilities to accommodate spaces for more education, administration and housing among other things.

Students are creating different design ideas for ways in which the Westcott House could be used.

“With their fresh input and fresh perspectives they can offer new concepts,” Wojcik said.

The Future

As for the future, the work of past and present Miami students will be receiving both local and international recognition through exhibition. The furniture created for Fallingwater was first exhibited in a barn on the site from March through June of 2006. In 2009, it will be joined with new work in a bicentennial exhibition at Miami University’s Art Museum called “Towards New Conceptions of Organic Architecture: Learning from the Experience of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Westcott Houses.” The museum is giving the architecture students $2,250 to help set up the exhibition which will run from January to May of 2009.

After its time at the art museum, the exhibit will travel throughout the United States to places such as the Boston Architectural Center, the California Institute of the Arts, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. It will then be entered in an international design competition aimed at getting architects to think about living close to the land and sustainable design.

Reynolds will also journey to Florida this spring to attend the Miami Alumni Association’s Winter College. He will showcase what the students have done thus far and where their work will go in the future.

Over the years the students’ involvement with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpieces has been centered on relationships—relationships between a professor and his students, students and their organic discoveries in architecture, and all humans with nature. Reynolds’ enthusiasm for his students and their success is an undertone to every project undertaken at Fallingwater and Westcott House.

“Anything is possible. We have students who are so completely full of life,” Reynolds said. “I’d put my last name after any of their first names—I’m that proud of them.”

Admins lament lack of performance space

BY MEGAN MILSTEAD
NOV. 20, 2007

Ever wonder why Miami University doesn’t bring in big Broadway acts like Rent and Wicked to perform? According to Patti Liberatore, director of the Performing Arts Series (PAS), bringing Broadway to Miami is “somewhere between hard and impossible” for a quite simple reason: Miami doesn’t have the space.

Currently, Hall Auditorium, Millett Center, and the Gates-Abegglen Theater are the only venues available for such artistic performances.

James Lentini, dean of the School of Fine Arts (SFA), said that these sites are workable, but not exceptional.

“Taken in whole, the facilities we have here are adequate,” Lentini said. “They’re pretty good in some areas and adequate in others. And in some areas we’d love to be more than just minimally acceptable.”

Hall Auditorium is especially popular and its schedule is filled more than a year in advance for performances or guest speakers.

“The challenge we have is that Hall Auditorium has 750 or so seats and everyone wants it all the time,” Lentini said. “When anything gets larger than 750 seats it goes to Millett which is completely unacoustic for almost any musical performance.”

Millett, which can seat 1,000 to 10,000 people depending on the event, must be transformed from a basketball arena for artistic performances, and is not meant for music.

According to Liberatore, not just the crowd dislikes the venue.

“Wynton Marsalis actually spoke derogatorily from stage about performing in a gym,” Liberatore said of the jazz musician who performed with the Lincoln Jazz Orchestra April 6, 2003.

Long aware of this problem, Miami launched a study in 1999 to see if a new performing arts center (PAC) was feasible.

Robert Keller, Miami architect, said that the project fell through because of lack of donor support.

“There was a major donor associated with the project,” Keller said. “We started before 9/11 occurred, and then the whole financial outlook in the country took a dive soon after that. It was my understanding that the donor support wasn’t there. So we put the project on hold indefinitely.”

Keller said it is not unusual for projects to be researched and then put aside.

“In our long-range planning process there are a variety of long-range projects out there,” Keller said. “There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to when a project is acted upon and when it is not. We have other projects that are in that category as well.”

According to a long-range facilities plan from 2002, Miami was considering spending $94 million for new PAC space. It was to have room for around 1,400 seats and space for an undetermined type of food service. The proposed site was the current band practice field, which would have moved to the other side of Patterson Avenue. If approved and financed, the building would have opened this year.

“We wanted that building to be bright and full of energy and life and people every day,” Liberatore said.

Though she understands the cost of a new PAC is large, Liberatore feels it’s crucial for a university.

“A lot of students that come here went to high schools with better facilities than we have,” Liberatore said. “It’s a glaring hole in Miami’s toolbox to not offer our students a decent performing arts center.”

Lentini also feels a new PAC would help Miami compete with other universities in the area.

“We are sorely lacking that one performing space with the PAC that would make us highly competitive with the best institutions,” Lentini said.

In comparison, both Ohio University and The Ohio State University have state-of-the-art performance facilities with auditoriums that seat 2,000 and 2,477 respectively, according to their Web sites.

Liberatore understands that it is difficult for some to imagine spending so much money on a PAC.

“It’s a little hard at first glance to justify a huge building like that for a Performing Arts Series that has 15 performances a year. Many departments on campus need a larger gathering space for public events, like the Lecture Series and other student programming,” Liberatore said. “But we can justify huge stadiums for football teams who play seven home games a year.”

The musical specifications and standards required by performances add to the cost of facilities, she explained.

“Performing arts centers are one of the most expensive things to build because you need the volume in the concert hall because it is acoustic. You’ve got balconies and you need the sound to go up there and fill them.”

Though a new PAC is on hold indefinitely, a part of the original building plan is currently underway: Presser Hall renovations. According to Keller, the building’s upgrades, which will cost around $10 million, are not a short-term Band Aid fix to the PAC’s space problems.

“At least in my mind all of our effort and monies and so forth have been put to what is being gained through the Presser renovation project,” Keller said. “It should assist the SFA quite a bit. It should be a real improvement for the music department and the theater department.”

The renovated Presser, which should be finished by the end of the school year, will be used mostly by the music department. It will include three rehearsal spaces for large and small music ensembles and rooms for music education teaching and offices. While some members of the music department will need to stay in the current Center for Performing Arts located behind Shriver, they will vacate a decent amount of space.

This summer, that building will undergo what Lentini called a “functional renovation” to rework vacated spaces with the rest of the building. When ready, the building will include a dean’s suite—the dean’s office is currently in the Joyner House on Spring Street—conference room and theater scene shop. A long range facilities plan for 2007 says there will be additional renovations to the CPA in 2015-2018 that will total $19 million.

Both the Presser Hall and CPA renovations are being financed by the university.
While a new PAC is not on the books at present, the SFA has added it to its For Love and Honor campaign wish list. This time around, administrators are asking for a lead gift of $15 million to begin the project.