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Bob Unrath: Seeing MU through students' eyes

Bob Unrath joined Campus Facilities as manager of Design Services in September 1995.

ew Design Services Manager Bob Unrath wanted to know how students view the MU campus. So when he started his position last September, he lived in a residence hall for three months.

"It gave me the opportunity to see the campus from the students' eyes," he says. "I jokingly told my staff that I was going to take away their cars and make them walk to their projects so they could see the campus through the eyes of a student."

A native northeasterner, Unrath moved to Columbia, MO from Columbia, MD. In Maryland, he worked for Arbee Associates — a $30 million steelcase systems furniture distributor — where he directed facility management services.

His position with Campus Facilities' design services group is his first in an institutional setting. However, he has 20+ years experience as an architect in project design and management with private firms.

His expertise in long-range planning, automating facility data, and leading multi-disciplinary design teams will benefit MU as it begins a period of expansion.

"What attracted me to MU was the potential of the campus," he says. "I wanted to participate in this time of growth."

One of his first tasks as manager was to develop a mission statement with his staff and management.

The statement they developed reads: "Our mission is to provide professional architectural, engineering, and interior design services to our clients. We will deliver projects that are high quality, functional, cost-effective and timely while improving the image and maintaining the historic character of the MU campus."

Unrath believes that "we need to see the buildings on campus as real estate assets that need to be managed, maintained and upgraded." As he sees it, long-range planning is a critical part of fulfilling the design services mission statement.

He also has a commitment to anticipating trends: "We need to think ahead to the technology crunch that we'll be facing by making sure our electrical infrastructure supports Campus Computing's activities."

When Unrath lived in Baker Hall, it had been 20 years since he had lived on a campus. "The campus is a city," he says. "It showed me that we shouldn't consider a project by itself. We need to remember that it affects other parts of the campus."