I took a stroll through Vanderbilt University on my last day in Nashville last month.  It's an ok campus and would have been much better had there been students there.  Vanderbilt University is known for its academics and has a beautiful campus in Nashville's West End. Lush tree/plant cover reminds one of typical southern campus. These photos were taken during summer semester hence the lack of people.

 

 

1. Ugly student housing.

 

2. Parts of campus made me feel like I was taking a walk through the woods especially when you add in the sounds of crows and other animals lurking about.

 

3. Two paths....blah, blah, blah

 

4.

 

5. Very nice.

 

6.

 

7. Some dude.

 

8. Housing for important university people.

 

9. Artistic power plant shot.

 

10. Trippy shadows.

 

11. Bleh to Memorial Gymnasium.

 

12. Dudley Field is home to the Vanderbilt Commodores and the annual Music City Bowl game.  Here's a terribly weak attempt at a panoramic stitch.

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e33/UncleRando/Nashville/West%20End/StadiumPano.jpg (open it in a new window...too large for here)

 

13. I think this is a hotel, but either way it's right next door to the stadium.

 

14.

 

15. I bet you dirty architects just looove this building.

 

16. Lots of public art around campus, especially over by the medical block.

 

17.

 

18. Louvers!  So sexy.

 

19. The requisite campus coffee shop...perfect for zero business during Summer Semester on a Sunday.

 

20. Some building.

 

21.

 

22. Loved this for some reason.

Not bad.

Vanderbelt has some great new housing and a glitzy new student center just off the quad fronted by "some building." I was pretty impressed with the campus overall, except that it felt like it had two centers.

LOL ... well considering the fact that Vanderbilt is literally an arboretum, I think that might explain part of UncleRando's ambivalence to the campus. The conscious focus is on the landscape of the trees, and the architecture tends to be very contextual and muted.

 

Anyway, I visited Vanderbilt for the first time this year. I was fairly impressed. I think it's one of the more attractive campuses in the country. I also think that the area immediately surrounding the campus is a fantastic example of a neighborhood that is slowly shifting from suburban to urban. You can tell that Nashville must have implemented a form-based code near Vanderbilt, because all the new development has a noticeable urban character.

I never cared for Vandy's campus so much. It feels as if they had no campus plan and just started plopping down buildings wherever. The large dorms on West End are tragic and the proximity of the medical campus kills a lot of the feel.  There are some nice very buildings though.

 

Has anyone ever seen Rhodes College in Memphis?

Anyway, I visited Vanderbilt for the first time this year. I was fairly impressed. I think it's one of the more attractive campuses in the country. I also think that the area immediately surrounding the campus is a fantastic example of a neighborhood that is slowly shifting from suburban to urban. You can tell that Nashville must have implemented a form-based code near Vanderbilt, because all the new development has a noticeable urban character.

 

Yeah, there is a lot happening in the West End surrounding campus and it is pretty exciting to see it transform from suburban to urban.  With that said, much of the new development still has a clear auto-focus which needs to be dealt with over time.  It may help to narrow and traffic-calm West End Avenue at some point.

West End is becoming much more dense, but it is not a nice place to take a walk. It needs some serious streetscaping. Traffic is horrendous and it is only getting worse. It has a surburban-urban feel to it now. The density is there, but it is difficult to interact with the city in an urban fashion.

Agreed, West End is not a friendly street, and the traffic on it and on Hillsborough is horrible, way worse than what's seen in the north.  These streets aren't dense enough for a subway, but are too congested for surface rail. Also, the way the two streets split in a Y means any future rail will have to choose one or the other or go in some kind of strange loop. 

^my father-in-law was a high-up for MTA (transit authority). Subways are financially-prohibitive because of the dense amount of rock underneath Nashville and especially the West End corridor. It would cost 10x the normal amount to build subways in Nashville as compared to other cities (according to him). Additionally, light rail would face an intensely fierce political and land-use rights' battle in Nashville.

It is very rare to have a basement in Nashville, and there are very few underground garages downtown.  The one I have been in was really interesting because it didn't have any walls -- it was the rock itself.  So they blasted a pit and built the garage like an above-ground garage with no walls. 

 

I agree, I think a cut-and-cover subway would have to by dynamited and built right beneath the surface to minimize blasting, and that wouldn't work because of the expressway and railroad gulches.  It would be interesting to know if bored tunnels dug by TBM's could dig without dynamiting. 

 

I don't think surface light rail could work on West End from the Y intersection and across the I-40 bridge and railroad viaduct. It could work on West End from that point out to 440, but it definitely wouldn't work on Hillsboro.

If you remember how Broadway comes sloping down, the line could probably surface in the middle of Broadway down by 2nd Ave. 

 

Here is I think the logical all-subway route.  This is a grand total of 4 miles of track, but anyone familiar with this area knows it's very, very congested.