Construction pace heats up over the summer
Princeton NJ -- Significant progress on a number of major campus construction projects has been made over the summer. Jon Hlafter, director of physical planning, provided the following rundown on building activities:
• The Marquand Art Library addition to McCormick Hall was completed in August. The project involved both an underground addition with mostly compact shelving below a grass-roof terrace as well as a penthouse addition with seminar rooms containing study carrels. Related renovations within McCormick included the installation of elevators, which provide accessibility for disabled persons to previously inaccessible parts of the building, plus additional offices over McCormick 100 for public relations activities of the Art Museum. • The renovation and underground addition to East Pyne was completed in August as the first phase of the new Andlinger Center for the Humanities. The addition, constructed under the inner courtyard, accommodates a new 71-seat auditorium, classrooms and the language laboratory previously located in Jones Hall. Various language departments, which have been scattered around the campus during the two-year construction period, have returned to renovated space in East Pyne. Renovations to the adjacent Chancellor Green and construction of the new humanities building east of the Joseph Henry House are scheduled to be finished at the end of the calendar year, completing the Andlinger Center for the Humanities, which will be dedicated in late spring. The restored Chancellor Green rotunda will be used as an academic lounge and flanked by two seminar rooms. A café on the ground floor below will be accessed by a new exterior entrance from the direction of Nassau Street. The new wood-frame building will house Hellenic studies, Judaic studies and other humanities programs. • The Lawrence Apartment expansion, hampered by poor weather for most of the spring and much of the summer, will have units available near the end of the fall term. Graduate students assigned to Lockhart Hall will be the first to move into two five-story buildings and a six-story building. Construction of four three-story buildings will continue into the spring. The new complex will have a total of 206 apartments plus community rooms. • A major renewal of Witherspoon Hall has been completed for occupancy by Rockefeller College students this fall. A new set of common rooms on the first and ground floors, plus the installation of an elevator, gives access to all rooms in the building. It is the first building to incorporate trash chutes, instead of trash pickup at each floor. • Several other dormitories have had sprinkler systems installed this summer. After Lockhart Hall is vacated later this year, sprinkler installation will begin there. Sprinkler work also will be in progress in several dormitories during the academic year; however, no single dorm will be closed for complete renewal of the sort that has taken place previously at Patton, Blair, Little and Dod. • Construction will continue into the next academic year on the "ellipse" dormitory -- the residence hall that borders Poe and Pardee fields. Scheduled for completion in late spring 2004, the structure will accommodate just over 200 beds as well as a number of common rooms, including a student kitchen and dining room. A major archway at the northwest corner of the building will permit access to a courtyard and to the playing fields beyond by the campus community, including the annual Reunions P-Rade. When complete, the archway also is expected to attract a cappella singing groups, many of which will enjoy practice facilities in the basement of the new building. The campus radio station WPRB will be relocated to the basement as well from Holder Hall. • Construction of the Berlind Theatre has been completed in time for this month's opening of "Anna in the Tropics" at the McCarter Theatre Center. The new 350-seat house will allow McCarter to extend the breadth of its presentations with a wider variety of productions. The new addition also includes two rehearsal halls, one for use by McCarter and the other by the University's Program in Theater and Dance. Site work will continue into the fall planting season, as will construction of a new mid-block crosswalk on University Place, which should increase pedestrian safety for McCarter's patrons and others. • The final phase of construction at the newly occupied Carl Icahn Laboratory -- teaching laboratories for molecular biology and genomics -- is due for completion in spring 2004. |
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