What used to be 900 sq. ft of concrete pavement outside Runk Dining Hall has become an "outdoor room" and livable space envisioned by two fourth-year graduate Architecture students.\nIn conjunction with ongoing University sustainability efforts, Nathan Foley and Kate Goodman helped create an outdoor, alfresco plaza in Hereford Residential College as an independent study project. The previously unused plot, which students ordinarily passed through, now is an area that Foley and Goodman hope students will use to eat, study and socialize.\n"People would occasionally go out there to make a phone call or have a cigarette," Foley said. "But the biggest intention of the plaza project was to create a place for people to want to hang out."\nNancy Takahashi, principal of Hereford Residential College and a landscape architecture lecturer, originally approached Foley and Goodman with the idea because she thought the pair's knack for outside-the-box thinking suited the project well.\n"I really give Kate and Nathan a lot of credit for dealing with the specifics of it," Takahashi said. "I [asked] them to take on the project and they took it from there."\nNative vegetation - including sweetbay magnolia and black gum trees, as well as blueberry and chokeberry bushes - now surrounds a cluster of outdoor chairs and tables outside the dining hall near Observatory Hill.\nBefore such changes appeared, though, Foley and Goodman were involved in lengthy planning sessions with University officials. The two used these meetings, which started in January and continued throughout spring, to present several different prototypes to Architecture faculty members.\n"We met with them a bunch of times with options to make something that was simple and easy to construct but at the same time create a unique space," Foley said.\nAny design or construction issues the two students encountered during the project's planning phase were dealt with during this period, he added.\n"They helped us identify the maintenance issues and raised questions that they knew would come up in the [University's Arboretum] Committee," he said, adding that the committee provided the majority of the project's funding. The committee "approved the plan and the funding in the same meeting ... We had all of our bases covered."\nIn addition to the Arboretum Committee, representatives from Hereford College, the University Housing Division and Dining Services provided support and guidance. ecoMOD, a student organization with ties to the Architecture School, helped develop designs for the plaza's tables and built them within a week, Foley said.\n"It was really a fun experience to work with Nancy and see the project be implemented in so short a time," he said.\nTakahashi said she is pleased with the project's outcome and the collaborative efforts of different University organizations.\n"So many entities of the community joined together to make this a really successful project," she said.
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