Chatham University
IN-2: Innovation 2

Eden Hall Campus is the first academic institution designed from the beginning to integrate sustainable development, learning, and living. Housing the new School of Sustainability and the Environment and a re-envisioned Rachel Carson Institute, the campus weaves together broad issues of sustainability to inform decision-making and the marketplace. Over time, it will evolve into a comprehensive campus that, linked with Chatham’s Shadyside Campus, connects physically and virtually to students, faculty, professionals, and leaders around the world. Members of Eden Hall Campus engage in immersive learning, rooted in the place but looking out to the world. Eden Hall Campus serves as a living laboratory where students and faculty analyze, reflect, create and live sustainably, inspired by each other and their unique natural, technological, and social surroundings. There are four main principles informing the development of the Eden Hall Campus: academic excellence, community building, robust natural environment, and high performance built environment. For academic excellence, Eden Hall Campus offers a model curriculum, focusing on systems thinking, interdisciplinary research, sustainability, and hands-on learning. For community building, strong relationships that develop across the campus and through global outreach via a “virtual campus” will enhance lifelong collaboration, leadership, and activism. For a robust natural environment, Eden Hall will restore natural systems, healthy streams and forests, and a focus on the “genius of the land” is designed to inspire and nurture a regenerative relationship with nature and its bounty. For the high performance built environment, demonstrating the principles of high performance design, Eden Hall Campus’ elegant and efficient buildings will provide a laboratory for testing best practices. The new campus is proposed to generate all energy on site and treat all wastewater on site. The goal for on-site carbon emissions will be net-zero. Structures on campus will be designed as living buildings, generating all of their own energy with renewable resources, capturing and treating all of their water on site, and using resources efficiently and for maximum beauty. The design of each building, site and the campus overall will focus on transportation, views, materials, water systems, and energy systems to elevate the campus to the highest levels of sustainable performance. The development plan will maintain appropriate stream buffers to protect water resources. The campus will protect and restore nearly 200 acres of the forest for teaching, research and demonstration, and will protect arable land, preserving productive landscapes and scenic views. Chatham University believes this to be an innovative program because we are one of the first universities to design a campus from the ground up to be an embodiment of sustainable principles - integrated sustainable development, learning and living for the future.