UNO Main Campus Expansion

Top Down Map View of New Dorm & Parking Garage

This is something I finished over a year ago while I was living on campus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO).  I lived at Maverick Village for 3 years and watched as UNO transitioned from a commuter school to a traditional state university.  UNO continues to expand and needs more on campus housing to maintain the transition to a traditional university.  One of the glaring deficiencies at UNO is parking.  For students living on campus, they lack a cafeteria on the main campus.  That is, residents of University & Maverick Village have to travel to South Campus at Scott Hall to get food.

My proposed project is an expansion of student housing on main campus with a cafeteria and a new parking garage.  The new dorms will be connected in an all-in-one building to encourage student interaction.  The current setup at Maverick and University Village lends itself to students staying cooped up in their rooms and only getting to know people in their building.  This setup will be more in line with traditional dormitories while maintaining the suite style design that's attractive to today's student.  The ever present parking problem at UNO would be aggravated by constructing the new dormitories.  Therefore, I propose first building a new parking garage on the north lot to replace the parking lost and add additional parking stalls.

The new dormitory building would house 360 students.  The proposed model is 5 stories high with 72 residents per floor.  Each floor has 18 four bedroom, two bathroom units.  The area of the building where the two wings come together would be used for offices, mail room, laundry facilities, and study/social areas spaced out over 5 stories.  The third level would use sky-bridges to connect to the parking garages on the north and south side of the dormitory complex.

Front of new dormitory complex viewed from north.  Cafeteria is located under enclosed glass area.

View from Dodge Street.  New parking garage on left.

The north wall of the parking garage would face Dodge Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Omaha.  This wall would offer a blank canvas that the University could put a large marquee on.  This would help advertise the University to the city and let people know where they are.  The marquee could light up at night like Creighton's marquee along Interstate 480.

The sky-bridges are one of the most useful concepts for this project.  They help alleviate the need for students to cross University Drive North & South.  Two roads that can be very busy depending on the time of day.  They also help shorten the commute from the garage to the dorm, something students at University & Maverick Village often complain about, especially during the bitter cold months.  Finally, they help make the dormitories handicap accessible.

After listening to the director of UNO's Health, Physical Education & Recreation (HPER) building talk about how he felt left out during college because of because of poor dormitory design, he uses a wheelchair to get around, I felt that any new dormitories needed to be accessible to ALL students.  The central area of the building would include an elevator shaft.  The sky-bridges would offer extra entrances that handicapped individuals could use as well as fire exits in case the elevator wasn't an option. 

Suite style floor-plan in an enclosed building allowing easy student interaction.

Front view of new dorms from east.

View from northeast.

View from southeast.

View from southwest.  Sky-bridge connects to existing parking structure.

I created the model in a program called 'Google Sketchup'.  If you install the program, you can download this model in the below link to really understand the concept:

Download Model

You can look inside the model and see the stairwells and elevator shaft.

Tell me what you think.