By: CHRISTINA CLARK
Staff Writer
clark66@umail.iu.edu
Construction in the Administration building made for a bit of confusion for students at the beginning of the fall semester, but that confusion should be cleared up by the time the spring semester ends, ahead of schedule. Soon, offices will be moved back to the Administration building, and in theory, be much less confusing for future students to locate.
“We really didn’t think we would be able to do any move-ins until after Spring Break, maybe early April or even May, but it looks like we’ll be done by the last week of January,” said Chancellor Terry Allison. “We may move people in before January ends.”
In “Footnotes from Chancellor Allison,” from spring 2016, Allison announced that “the $3.6 million renovation of the first floor of the Administration Building is underway.” The project has moved faster than expected, and Allison said it isn’t the only project on campus to do so.
“The Health Sciences building is running ahead, as well, in Riverside Hall,” he said.
The design of the new Administration Building is aimed at keeping services important to students together in a streamlined area.
“We’re going to have a lot more adjacency. The idea is financial aid to student aid to the bursar. The flow is all there to go directly from one to the other that students would need. We will have a new gateway that we’ll see that one of the concepts is to get people to come in from the parking lot rather than the front of the building—a relocated service gateway direct to students. We’ll have some more lounge space for students to sit and study, to work together in teams and small meeting rooms, and then, the other big feature you’ll see is a much more open concept. More glass. Staff will be more visible, and accessible to students,” Allison said.
That isn’t all though, there is a Veterans suite added as well.
“We’ve never had this before—an area for our Veteran Student Services, sort of a lounge area for them,” said Allison.
There are other things moving around on campus as well that may find their homes outside of their original space.
“We moved ACE (Academic Centers for Excellence) temporarily to the library. We planned to put it in the Administration building with the rest of the student success areas, so we’re going to see if we can fit ACE in the library or not. That really is based on the cost of permanent relocation of ACE to the library, and what we would have to do with the library building to accommodate ACE there and other costs with moving part of the library collection is what we really have to evaluate with the trade-off there,” Allison said.
“Our projects altogether that we plan to do are $20 million dollars,” said Allison, keeping in mind that the Administration building makes up for three-point-six of that. The first of the projects was the Arts and Education Building, followed by The Grille’s renovation.
