The University Board of Visitors’ Building and Grounds Committee tabled its discussion of two proposed research buildings on Grounds after several members expressed concerns yesterday with the proposed architectural design of the buildings.
The research buildings, the Information Technology Engineering building and the Arts and Sciences Research building, would be located near the rest of the University’s science/engineering-related facilities off Whitehead Road, as outlined in the current plans. Representatives from both the Engineering School and the College explained the purposes of the two buildings, which have a combined cost of $165.2 million, to the Board.
“The science building is intended to do for the sciences what Ruffin did for the arts,” College Dean Meredith Jung-En Woo said, later noting that she hoped the Arts and Sciences Research building would help to foster undergraduate student-faculty research and a “willful violation of department boundaries.”
The ITE building, meanwhile, was planned to include a variety of high-tech features similarly designed to promote research, University Architect David Neuman said. He also noted that the building’s plans would provide enhanced common space and a garage bay that would allow robots and other research subjects such as engines to be studied and deployed.
Several Board members, though, said they felt the proposed architectural design for the two buildings was too much of a departure from that found elsewhere on Grounds.
Board member Don Pippin raised several concerns about the flat roof planned for each structure. Rector William Heywood Fralin, meanwhile, said, “they don’t look up to the architectural standard,” also noting that the two research facilities would have been built in areas very visible to thousands of spectators and visitors attending University football games.
Neuman noted that the architectural design of the proposed structures was fully in compliance with the qualitative guidelines the Board had prescribed, adding that it is important to keep in mind that the type of structures being put proposed could not physically have been designed 175 years ago because of sustainability and other modern concerns. Board members, however, decided to table their decision, requesting more time to look over the plans and possibly see some modifications.
“I don’t think we should have some for and against on something like this,” Board member Daniel Abramson said.
— compiled by Thomas Madrecki
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