USA: How the University of Iowa recovered from the 'unfathomable' flood that ruined it
By John Schwartz
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In all, the raging waters caused $750 million in flood damage [to the University of Iowa in 2008], with $36 million in equipment lost in one building alone. Twenty-two major buildings were damaged, some of them irreparably; a quarter of the school’s classroom space was lost, and one-sixth of the university’s 2.6 million square feet of space was closed. The level of flooding “was unfathomable to those of us who lived through the previous record flood” of 1993, said Rod Lehnertz, the university’s senior vice president for finance and operations.
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The destruction would have been far less severe if the school had listened to advice offered more than 100 years before. The school, expanding from the small amount of land given to it by the state when the capital moved to Des Moines in the 1850s, had been warned in 1905 by its landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers, not to build close to the water.
Squeezed by a growing city around it, however, the university built critical facilities close by. “It struggled to find the land that it did,” said Charles Connerly, the director of the school of urban and regional planning at the university, “and some of them turned out to be bad choices,” he said.
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In the ensuing years, the school replaced two structures that had been destroyed, including Hancher Auditorium, which it rebuilt at a safer elevation. Some of the damaged architectural gems on the campus, including an art building designed by Steven Holl, are now protected by barriers that can be erected and put in place in a matter of days. The Iowa Memorial Union had a sunken courtyard facing the water before the flood; now a high patio sits atop a flood barrier, protecting the building and giving the university community commanding views of the waterway.
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