Architects involved in the campus master plan project (Shepley Bulfinch) and the first new building, the alumni center (Ann Beha Architects), got together with a team from Reed-Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture in September, and possible shapes of the 21st-century Colby campus began to come into better focus.

First and foremost among landscaping design challenges is how to maintain harmony with the rather formal design of the existing campus as new buildings are sited east of Mayflower Hill Drive. Part of the solution is a concept called The Colby Green, modeled on a town common and likely to feature an elliptical lawn across the road from the Miller Library terraces. That shape, and trees and plantings around it, would knit together the existing Lunder admissions building, the proposed alumni and development building and two of the academic buildings envisioned in The Plan for Colby--an interdisciplinary social sciences center and a psychology/math/computer science building.

Putting academic buildings across Mayflower Hill Drive changes the picture, maybe even changes the center of gravity of the campus, said landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand at a campus forum in October. Reed-Hilderbrand proposed a series of zones of different character including the formal, beaux arts precinct of the existing quadrangles; a greensward of rougher lawn and trees; managed woodlands; open meadows and fields; and more diverse woodlands including the arboretum.

Reed-Hilderbrand showed aerial photos of the campus taken in the early 1960s that showed little tree cover in the developed part of campus and pasture from the Miller Library lawn to Messalonskee Stream. Nothing is static in a landscape, Hilderbrand said.