Revised Plan for New Academic Building and Parking Garage Project

The upper part of the picture shows the New Academic Building and Parking Garage in an aerial view. The lower part shows a cross-section of the building and parking garage, with Boynton Street on the right. Courtesy of Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architects

In the not too distant future, it appears that WPI will have a new academic building and a parking garage. Both of these buildings will be placed on the hill south of the Gordon Library. This plan is somewhat different than the previous plan for the building and the parking garage.

Last summer, the Board of Trustees decided to "turn off the meter," meaning that the architects would no longer be generating costs in connection to the project. In February, the Board decided to go ahead with the new plan detailed in the diagrams.

The original design for the building was 62,000 square feet. Under that plan the cost of the whole project would be about 40 million dollars, according to Provost John Carney. That building was to house the Management department, the Humanities and Arts department, and Continuing Education. This new plan calls for a 45,000 square foot building. According to Carney the total project would cost approximately 31.9 million dollars. This building will hold the Humanities and Arts department, as well as the Computer Science department.

The difference in cost is primarily a result of the smaller size of this design, as compared to the original design. According to Carney, this building will have fewer classrooms and will now have labs for the CS department. Some of the new classrooms that are needed will be the product of renovating Perreault Hall. With the change in plans, the Management department will be replacing the CS department in Fuller Labs. They will share Fuller with Information Technology. According to Carney, the Continuing Education department will now need to find a new home.

Carney said that every available academic space is being used. According to Carney, that is why this building is so necessary. He said, despite the lower cost of this new plan, "We are not skimping on the building, nor are we skimping on the parking garage." He also said, "It won't even look like a parking garage." The parking garage will have 496 spaces on five stories. It will sit behind the new building and behind the library on Boynton Street. When the garage is complete, the plan, according to Carney, is to "green the Quad."

According to Campus Police Chief John Hanlon, the Library parking lot has approximately 200 spaces and the Quad parking lot has approximately 170 spaces. When the parking garage is completed, there will be approximately 130 more spaces than are currently in the two parking lots. Hanlon said that the number of cars on campus daily has risen in the last five years because of more employees and more visitors on campus. Hanlon said, "It has become more and more difficult to accommodate the cars coming on campus on a daily basis."

Hanlon also noted that several of the local streets have been made "resident only parking" by the City of Worcester. This means that in order to park on the street, your vehicle must be registered to that address. Hanlon mentioned that besides having the new parking garage, he is hoping to generate more parking spaces near Prescott Street.

According to Carney, the next step is to meet with the Humanities department and CS to design the spaces inside the building. He said that the big task now is to raise the money for construction. The Board of Trustees has a restriction that an academic building cannot be financed through debt. The entire cost of the new academic building must be raised, with 90 percent of it being committed before breaking ground.

Carney said that once construction begins, it would take 14 to 16 months to complete the project. The parking garage would go up faster than the academic building. Carney said, "I would love to see us move into the building in three years."