princeton university mixed-use and research district
DumontJanks worked with Delaware North Development, our friends at Elkus Manfredi Architects, and Princeton University to plan a new residential, mixed use, and research district as part of Princeton’s long-range plan for the Princeton Forrestal Campus which sits across the lake from the historic campus core. The land history of the entire Forrestal campus was largely agricultural and commercial nursery, which since the 1970s, has sequentially transformed from separate corporate campus headquarters, into a mixed-use district, then several separated enclaves of residential uses. Our work explored two separate planning ideas. First, was the limited addition of another individual parcel development within the larger landholdings and with a similar mixture of uses. Here, we performed a rigorous review of more restrictive stormwater regulations and the unique topography and remnant hedgerows of the old commercial nursery operation.
The second idea sought to help Princeton envision a more united, integrated approach to the entire landholdings versus the current aggregate of independent developments. We reviewed the historic core campus development and all the adjacent developed parcels since the 1970s with their respective and separate mobility infrastructure of roads, train, pedestrian, and bikeways, current land uses, and the underlying hydrology patterns that govern development. The key challenges were to make a singular connective district and development idea that had the same compact benefits of the existing Princeton host community; to develop a rational way to make mobility patterns more connected, and to envision a comprehensive preserve and stormwater idea that would govern future development, land use distribution, and density.
