Jobs@UIOWA - Human Resources
Robert Brooks
associate director of campus and facilities planning for landscape services in Facilities Management
Photo by Tom Jorgensen.
The next time you stop to smell the rhododendrons, you might want to thank Robert Brooks. He's associate director of campus and facilities planning for landscape services in UI Facilities Management. Brooks and his crew of 43 employees are responsible for designing and maintaining everything around buildings and above-ground on campus, including sidewalks, institutional roads, signs, lighting, and more than 1,000 acres of grass, shrubs, trees, and flowers.
A native of the Quad Cities and graduate of Pleasant Valley High School, Brooks attended, in his words, that other Iowa university (Iowa State) and earned a bachelor's degree in landscape architecture before taking a job with the Waterloo Parks Department. He came to The University of Iowa in December 1987 as associate director of the then-named Physical Plant, overseeing grounds and custodial service. Last year, after several promotions and reorganizations, UI Facilities Management put Brooks in charge of campus landscape services.
What drew you to this line of work?
I've always been interested in nature and plants. My family was in farming. Not my parents, but my grandparents, and my great aunts and uncles, and I spent a lot of time on farms gardening and that type of thing. When I went to school, I was torn between studying architecture and landscape architecture. After getting through the first two semesters of calculus and seeing that there were many more semesters ahead of calculus and engineering, I decided plants and soils was more my thing.
Your office was heavily involved in clearing and replanting some 62 trees after the tornadoes of 2006. Where were you when the storm struck?
My partner and I own the Brown Street Inn Bed and Breakfast [on the north side of Iowa City], and we were on the front porch of the place, you know, stupidly doing what people do, trying to see what we could see between the flashes of lightning when we heard what they always refer to as the sound of a train. We understood that it was time to head to the basement, and so we did. We also owned an apartment building in the block where the [Alpha Chi Omega] sorority was heavily damaged, and first we headed down there to see how the tenants were doing. We had about $65,000 worth of damage to that. Then I packed off and headed to campus shops. We have a very good response system, a phone tree, and that went into effect immediately, and we had a full contingent of people there already beginning to clear trees out of the street and work on getting that part of campus opened back up.
Any interesting landscape projects in the works?
As with any Big Ten school, resources are limited so we have to be creative and focus our attention, which we have started to do with the Pentacrest. That's our iconic center of campus, so we're really working to upgrade the quality of the landscape there, including putting in an irrigation system. We're installing a smart system that downloads daily satellite weather information and automatically adjusts how much and how frequently to water the grass, whether it's every day, every other day or once a week. The investment really wasn't that much for that type of control.
What do you consider the most picturesque spot on campus?
That's difficult. The Pentacrest goes without saying. Another interesting area is the Quad ravine, the wooded glen that goes up by the Bowen Science Building off Newton Road at the end of the Iowa Avenue footbridge. Although it needs a lot of repair and maintenance right now, we have a master plan to redo that, to rebuild the retaining walls and steps and everything. Which will be nice, because it's an area where you can remove yourself from the hustle and bustle of campus.
What's the best part of your job?
There's a history here that we're trying to preserve and protect while also advancing and moving into new technologies and new needs. You always have to remember that the alumni who come back are looking for that oak tree where they met their wife or some other place from their memory. The campus landscape has a life that just goes on and on. You forget about that. Students go to school four years and they're gone and they don't ever want to go back, but sometime in the future they'll want to return and want to find the IMU footbridge or the fountain, so you work to keep certain things around and in good condition. Like I always remind my civil engineer friends who do a lot of concrete work, "We plant a tree and it's only going to get better from there. You pour concrete and it just starts to deteriorate."
What do you do outside of work? Any hobbies?
I'm on the Iowa City Planning and Zoning Commission, which is always interesting, and I was chair the past two years. We travel, mostly in the United States. And we have the bed and breakfast, which exposes us to people from all over the world. We've had guests from Australia and India, the Netherlands, Japan, the Philippines--a lot of them University-connected people--so you get to travel vicariously through these people.
This article was adapted from fyi, The University of Iowa's Faculty and Staff Newsletter. fyi is published by the Office of University of Relations-Publications. To read more about The University of Iowa and the many remarkable employees, please visit their website.