The architectural firm charged with redesigning the College's dining, social, athletic and recreational facilities will present its proposals to the College community tomorrow and Wednesday afternoon in public meetings in Tindle Lounge.
The Centerbrook Architects will present their visions of dining and social areas on Tuesday and address athletic and recreational facilities the following day.
"They think they have some pretty good ideas about what they are hearing from the public, and they want to present them to the campus," Dean of Student Life Holly Sateia said.
While workshops were initially geared toward input from undergraduate and graduate students, Sateia said the architects are beginning to focus on certain proposals and will be presenting their impressions: although, their ears will remain open to further suggestions.
"The architects' study is preliminary, so in all likelihood [it] will lead to a construction project, but this phase is more program driven and diagrammatic than an architectural design," College Architect and Associate Director of Facilities Planning George Hathorn said.
According to Hathorn, the student feedback has been recorded since late spring. Past open workshops enabled Centerbrook to gather comments from students and staff. Student input was also generated as a result of summer BlitzMail surveys sent to students.
"I still would like to see more students at the workshops, but I'm counting on the students who do go to inform people about this process," Sateia said.
One reason for holding meetings this fall is to create an opportunity to involve the members of the Class of 2003, Sateia said.
The prevailing theme in designing future social and athletic space is that it merely marks the beginning of a lengthy and multi-stepped course of action, according to Sateia.
"It's an exciting step in the process, but there is still a tremendous amount of work that has to be done," Sateia said.
Sateia said Centerbrook will submit the master plan for the Board of Trustees' review, at which point it will be evaluated "in the context of institutional priorities and by what can be done."
According to Hathorn, Centerbrook incorporated information received from past sessions and now is creating updated options, which will eventually be outlined in a November report to be shared with the Trustees at their November meeting.
"In all likelihood, what gets presented to the Trustees will be one plan for modification of the athletic complexes and another plan illustrating proposed improvements to the social spaces like Collis, Robo [Robinson Hall] and Thayer," Hathorn said.
Sateia, who sits on the core working groups of athletics and dining services, said she to tries encourage student involvement in the process through collaborating with students and publicizing meetings.
Hathorn functions as the overall coordinator of the effort, arranging meetings and acting as the College liaison with Centerbrook.
