n the late 1800s, silver-tray tea lounges, smoky gramophone rooms and white-linen dining distinguished the elegant union buildings where British university students gathered to debate, read, andplay billiards. These private wood-paneled unions provided the blueprint for the more egalitarian campus centers that today serve as "living rooms" on U.S. college campuses.

Since 1871, WPI has grown from two buildings and an initial graduating class of 16 male seniors to 31 major buildings and a student body of 3500 men and women. But the campus still lacks a living room.

That's about to change. In October 1997, the WPI Board of Trustees approved a $17 million WPI campus center project. The 68,000-square-foot campus center building, to be sited behind Alumni Gymnasium, is being designed by Boston Architects Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott. Fund raising for the project will be part of a major capital campaign to be publicly launched in the latter half of 1998, and the trustees have called for ground to be broken by October 1999.

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Janet Begin Richardson at the site of the proposed campus center. She says the building will promote the learning and maturing that goes on outside the classroom.

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The idea of a WPI campus center has been germinating for many years. The dream moved closer to reality four years ago when then-WPI president Jon Strauss appointed a broad-based planning committee, chaired by Janet Begin Richardson, assistant vice president for student affairs and dean of student life, to determine what a campus center would add to WPI and to define the right mix of facilities, amenities and services needed to create such a center.

The committee solicited opinions of more than 40 campus focus groups, pored through information from earlier center initiatives, surveyed the literature on college centers worldwide, and visited campus centers throughout the region. Richardson says they began by asking, "What's missing at WPI?" The most common response, she reports, was "a place in the center of the campus for the community to gather.

The focus groups also told the committee that WPI lacked adequate dining facilities, space for group study, small conference and meeting rooms, multipurpose rooms, and offices for student organizations. THe proposed WPI center will have all that, along with a bookstore, a postal facility, expanded food and dining services, a game room, lounges and a campus information desk.

Richardson says the new center should make WPI more attractive to prospective students. Campus centers, she notes, can provide an immediate "snapshot" of campus life to potential students and influence applicants' decisions to enroll when academic and scholarship considerations appear equal among the colleges they're considering.

The center will also fill a void in the social and academic life of the campus, she says, providing WPI students, faculty and staff a place to gather and explore common social, intellectual and cultural interests in an informal setting. And, it will be a common ground where WPI's diversity of populations (students, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors) and its diversity of functions (offering academic programs, housing and feeding students, offering opportunities for social and recreational involvement) will come together.

"But even more than a gathering place, the center will be an important adjunct to the University's academic programs," Richardson says. "It will serve as a social 'laboratory' for promoting and nurturing the all-important learning and maturing that happens outside the classroom and lab - experiences that can be critical to the personal and social growth that is so essential to the full realization of a WPI education."

Even without a gramophone, the new WPI Campus Center promises to be a "living room" worth the wait.

Elizabeth Walker