OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Construction of the Student Success Center begins in 2023. Get involved in the planning!
Over the next decades, OSU-Cascades will expand, creating a 128-acre campus for up to 5,000 students. The transformation of the university properties — a former pumice mine and former Deschutes County demolition landfill — is one of the most innovative university development projects in the country. While expansion will be slow — perhaps one building every two years — our goal is to share the story of the development and the ways we will minimize its impact on our surrounding community.
The webcam looks west to the Cascade mountains. To the left is Edward J. Ray Hall, which opened to students in fall 2021. The view encompasses the reclaimed pumice mine, where the bottom was once 100 feet below the surrounding land. During the reclamation work, crews removed fill material in the mine, processed it and replaced it to create a structurally consistent material. Sheer cuts on the sides of the mine were re-sloped to improve access into the campus and provide material to raise the bottom of the mine to the final design elevation — as much as 40 feet in places. Additionally, remediation of the adjacent demolition waste landfill — also owned by the university — yielded clean soil and rock to be used as fill in the pumice mine.
View timelapses here.
The campus long range development plan earned an award for innovative design from the national Society for College and University Planning.
It outlines the transformation of underutilized land into a campus that meets the needs of future generations, emphasizing:
Campus operations and construction — and the economic ripple effect they create — will bring more than $273 million to Oregon in 2034.
Campus plans include 10 miles of walking and biking trails, an amphitheater, recreation fields, food venues with outdoor seating, an Innovation District and mid-market affordable housing.
We envision a campus that pushes the edge of the sustainable built environment frontier and provides students with extraordinary opportunities to shape a thriving community, on and off campus.
