By Kristina Goetz
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The master plan that has shaped the University of Cincinnati campus for 13 years will soon be updated.

UC administrators gave the Board of Trustees a preview Wednesday of the next phase of development that will impact the campus of 33,000 students through 2012.

"The plan has moved from a state where we were correcting problems to accommodating academic planning," said UC spokesman Greg Hand. "Up until this point we had to repair the campus. Now that we have suitable space, the colleges are saying we need more to educate students in a wired environment and (plan) more for research and advanced study."

Throughout the 1990s, UC officials focused on putting the campus back together, modernizing outdated buildings and finding remedies for space problems related to enrollment increases that had not been previously addressed.

But technology and graduate school enrollment, in part, have now driven a demand for a different kind of space - and more of itGraduate school applications have increased 11 percent each year for the past two years, officials said. And UC is on target to reach similar increases for the fall.

Graduate students need labs with sophisticated equipment, libraries and offices. Technology, too, has had an impact on space. A laptop won't fit on an old tablet desk; seminar rooms need audio-visual equipment.

Hargreaves Associates, the San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm that helped develop the master plan in 1990, briefed the board about increasing demands from academic departments.

Just how to expand a land-locked campus with a high density of people near a thriving neighborhood will be a question board members must address. But it won't happen until specific recommendations are made in November. "This next wave is going to take these colleges and answer how we satisfy their future growth," said university architect Ron Kull. "We're charting the course for those who are going to come after us."

E-mail kgoetz@enquirer.com