Parents and alumni gathered on Saturday to hear Dean of Campus Programs and future University Center Director Rick Culliton’s presentation on the new Suzanne Lemberg Usdan University Center, scheduled to open for the Fall 2007 semester. About sixty percent of the plumbing and mechanical projects in the new center have been completed, and the University hopes to complete it in July or August 2007.
“With the addition of the masonry, it’s starting to look like a real building,” Culliton said.
Showing aerial views of the new center, Culliton underscored the unity that architects and planners hoped to achieve with the innovative design. The building incorporates the slate roofs and brownstone facades of surrounding buildings on College Row, while also being structured intentionally with different, longer-lasting brownstone.
“If you look at North College, some of the brownstone is flaking off, partly because it was oriented the wrong way in the building process,” Culliton said.
The new brownstone is from Germany, rather than from the famous Portland Quarry where the University had previously bought building supplies. This change, according to Culliton, is another small step in the fresh direction he hopes the new center will bring to campus life.
The first floor will house the Usdan Café, which Culliton said he envisions as a bustling center of caffeine-laden students and sandwich preparation. Students may also find on the first floor the Box Office, the computer store, new WSA offices, general office spaces, and an assortment of meeting rooms ranging from 6-8-person to 70-person occupancy and each complete with audio/visual equipment. A new Wesleyan Station will also be found in the center, offering a box for each individual student—a feature that Culliton said is very popular among students.
The second floor will be dedicated exclusively to dining, offering two dining halls each with a capacity of more than 300 people, and the Andrus terrace, one of the architectural amenities that Culliton said he sees as a future crowd-pleaser.
In a gesture towards comfort, light, and space, the third floor of the University Center will house the Daniel Famiel Common, the University Lounge, and an additional terrace. The terrace overlooks Andrus field and will act, Culliton joked, as the University’s equivalent to box seats at baseball and football and games.
Culliton gave the most attention to dining options at the new center during his presentation.
“What this will allow us to do is to really look at our dining on campus,” Culliton said, explaining the history of the Davenport Campus Center.
When Davenport became a center for food services, the University had to change the building from a site for lab science to accommodate kitchens. The more state-of-the-art kitchen in the new Center hosts a woodfire pizza oven and a Mongolian grill. The Kosher Kitchen will relocate to the new Center as well, making its isolation in the Butterfields a thing of the past.
As a result of the new University Center, dining on campus will change dramatically. MoCon will be decommissioned and possibly torn down, and Pi Café, Summerfields, and Weshop will remain as old staples of the dining experience on campus. The new Usdan Marketplace will provide more space for students and the flexibility of the space is thought to be more amenable to the needs of diners at different times of the day.
Culliton expressed his awareness of the concern expressed by students and alumni about the preservation of the Fayerweather architecture during construction. Indeed, the famous turrets looming over Andrus field have been completely shelled out and new steel framework has been put in, juxtaposing the old University with the new.
There are, of course, more changes to come. The current Davenport Campus Center will be used as a space for academics, housing classrooms as an answer to the overcrowded Public Affairs Center. The renovated Fayerweather section will be made available to students as a rehearsal hall and will offer a large ballroom for seated dining and dances. As the for former squash courts, Culliton hopes with sufficient monies from fundraising, this could become a University Teaching Museum for students and visitors.
“They’ve given a lot of thought to the functionality [of the new building]—it’s not so modern that it’s austere or sterile,” remarked Nancy and Gary Stuber P’10, parents of a freshman who were first attracted Wesleyan because of its “old charm.”
In contrast, studio art major Owen Detlor ’07, believes the design for the new center does not harmonize with the surrounding architecture.
“[The design] is cheesy historicism which doesn’t have that much authenticity,” Detlor said. “They are trying to recreate the material palate of historical Wesleyan, but these aren’t contemporary materials that contractors know how to build with anymore.”
Whatever positions members of the University community take, the new center is only several months away from completion. The presentation’s title, “The Heart of the Campus” is telling of the goal of Culliton and his associates: in a changing, spread-out campus, they hope to create an oasis of student activities and dining.
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