In the process of determining where we are, where we want to be and planning how we get there, facilities planners and campus architects for Perkins & Will, and Ayers/Saint/Gross say they are about midway to preparing MUSC for its future.

“We’ve been to all four and a half million square feet of this campus and we’ve logged more than 40 hours of interviews with hundreds of people—directors of centers, invited guests, people from city planning, and with Charleston architects,” said Perkins & Will architect and planner Les Saunders.

“We want to create a development plan that reflects an equilibrium of education, research and patient care activities on campus,” Saunders said.

“I think (MUSC president) Dr. (James B.) Edwards put it best in his charge to us,” said Adam Gross of Ayers/Saint/Gross. “He told us to plan for the maintenance and enhancement of MUSC’s existing facilities, plan a growth strategy for immediate and future needs, and enhance the physical appearance of the campus.

“We’re working in the midst of the most beautiful city in America,” Gross said.

“It’s amazing how green this city is,” Saunders added, citing Charleston’s “pocket parks” and hidden gardens scattered amid the homes, office buildings, shops and churches. Their aim is to bring the character and charm of the city onto the university campus as they anticipate MUSC’s growth into the next century.

But it’s not all parks and gardens. That’s the visible part, and the least expensive. The part that costs the most goes mostly unnoticed, Saunders said. It’s the maintenance that’s been deferred, the machinery that needs updating. It’s what few see and is seldom noticed until it breaks that requires the most resources.

Saunders said that planning for growth means anticipating space needs at a time when education methods are shifting from large auditorium classes to small groups, at a time when research funding at MUSC is soaring and lab space is at a premium, and at a time when primary and ambulatory care is expanding to better serve patients in need of MUSC’s specialized care.

While Saunders and Gross both look at the project as a whole and work to coordinate all factors to be considered, they view the campus from different perspectives.

“He looks at it from 40,000 feet,” Saunders said of Gross. “I’m taking the micro view, the education programs, the research, patient care, individual buildings and their condition, remedial repair, maintenance and replacement.”

Gross, on the other hand, sees the campus as an environment, a location in peninsular Charleston, surrounded by neighborhoods, a living and vibrant place in which people work and move about. “This is an institution that seeks to increase traffic to its services, located on a peninsula that is trying to restrict traffic,” Gross said as an example of the kind of dilemma that needs to be addressed. Another is campus density, or how to increase usable space while enhancing the beauty of the campus environment.

Spreading space maps out on a boardroom table, Gross compared the aerial schematic of MUSC in scale to that of Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University and the University of Maryland at Baltimore. The comparison was striking. Each city campus is dense with buildings, but not MUSC.

The buildings here are separated with what Saunders and Gross call open space, except that a good portion of it is covered with asphalt rather than grass and trees. It’s in these areas that they see the potential for an expansion of facilities to be softened with gardens, paths and low walls that serve as pleasant interludes from one building to another.

Perkins & Will, and Ayers/Saint/Gross representatives, under the direction of Saunders and Gross are trying to collect as much information from as many sources as possible. They’ve found information and inspiration from all quarters of the university, Gross said, from engineers and grounds keepers in the physical plant to hospital administrators and students.

Saunders and Gross want to hear from as many people as possible who care about MUSC’s future and how it will grow, how it will operate, how it will look, and how it will face the next century. Please see the form accompanying this article, read it and use it to make your opinion known. The MUSC campus layout reveals a dispersed collection of buildings that make movement difficult throughout all but the most central locations.

He has a special attachment...to Charleston and especially to MUSC, says Perkins & Will representative Les Saunders. It’s one of those incidents, the significance of which is not recognized, in this case, not until two generations later.

Saunders tells it this way: “In the 1920s in Florence, S.C., a young man was driving a car that he was sure could beat an oncoming train to the railroad crossing. And in those days cars really could stall on the tracks. His car stalled and was hit by the train. Although he was severely injured, he was alive. But his legs were crushed, and doctors said the best they could do was amputate them. At his insistence, however, he was instead loaded onto a boxcar and transported to Charleston, where, at what was then the Medical College of South Carolina, stainless steel pins were used to mend and strengthen the multiple breaks in his limbs.

“He managed to walk again, albeit with a severe limp. But in the meantime, while he was recuperating flat on his back for weeks on end, his young wife gave birth prematurely to a tiny baby girl. In those days, there was little hope for severely premature infants. They were expected to die. But instead, while he was lying there waiting for his bones to heal, he held the infant on his chest, giving her the warmth and movement she needed.

“That little baby survived and grew to be a young woman with children of her own. “She’s my mom,” he said.