Construction Season at ASU

By Cara Kelly
As anyone who has driven down King or Rivers streets is most likely aware, construction projects at

Appalachian State University are progressing steadily as the school expands to meet the needs of its growing population of students.

The construction site for the new education building is in the site development phase, with all preexisting structures on College Street having been demolished this summer. The focus is currently on utility relocation, specifically water lines, and a little bit of grating work on the side, which is the cause of the relocation of the pedestrian walk-way and automotive traffic on College Street.

“We’re in the design phase for the building itself,” business affairs vice chancellor Greg Lovins said. “The schematic part has already been completed and the design development drawings are currently with the state construction office.”

Green Construction Company won the site development bid, which was separated from the general contractor bid. Bidding for the general contractor of the project will begin in the spring.

“In terms of seeing steal in the ground, hopefully sometime in the latter part of the summer you’ll start seeing some real construction work,” Lovins said.

The occupants of the new education building largely will be transplants from the Edwin Duncan building. Four major departments have been housed in Edwin Duncan, including Curriculum Instruction, Reading, Language and Exceptionalities, Human Development and Psychological Counseling and Leadership and Educational Studies. The dean and associate administrator’s offices will also be housed in the new building.

Instruction and office space will be greatly increased in the new building, which will be 33,000 square feet larger than Edwin Duncan Hall.

After construction is complete, Edwin Duncan will be used for swing space as other renovations and construction projects are carried out.

“Somewhere down the road, we will renovate Sanford Hall, so those occupants will need to have somewhere to go. We plan on a new building on the site of I.G. Greer, and of course we’re space sparred on our campus,” Lovins said. “Eventually, we do want to take Duncan down and add a little more green space, particularly since we are restoring Kraut Creek, which runs through campus.”

Another long-overdue project is nearing completion on campus, according to Lovins. The new dining hall and food court will begin operation in January 2009. The dining facility will replace Welborn Hall, the east side of which is currently the oldest building on campus.

“It will be an almost 90,000 square feet building, which will add about 20,000 square feet of space when the entire building is done,” Lovins said.

The move will begin with some equipment and stores of food in December, but students and customers will not be served until the beginning of the spring semester.

After the initial move, Welborn will be torn down in order to construct the planned circular food court, which will extend into the area currently occupied by Welborn Hall. The food court will hopefully be completed by December 2009.

“You’ll have a lot of the same venues as you did in Welborn. Home-style cooking, wraps, Chick-Fil-A, the salad bar area, the sushi area, all of those things in the existing dining hall you’ll have in the new dining hall, but there will be more space for serving lines, a large seating area and better cooking facilities,” Lovins said.

“There will be more space for our great staff to do their work in the behind-the-scenes areas.”

As for changes in the variety of food options, Lovins said the university will be continuing to assess students’ tastes as it has in the past, listening to comments and concerns voiced by student diners.

“For right now, the hours are going to stay the same, in the new facility at the very beginning we’re combining the cafeteria and food court into the same section, so there will be some expanded hours until we finish phase two of the move,” Lovins said. “Then when we move in we’ll assess those hours, again we look at demand and student demand. It is not cost efficient for us to keep all operations open all the time, so again we’ll try to find the right balance.”

Attendees of the first two Appalachian Mountaineer home football games have seen improvements in the third area of construction on campus.

Increased space for bathroom facilities and concessions on the west and east sides of the stadium have been completed. A total of 4,374 seats was added to the east side of the stadium, or the visitors’ side. The increased seating has helped relieve the pressure of overcrowding, as another attendance record was broken during the first home game on Sept. 6 with 30,718 spectators entering the stadium, Lovins said.

“I think it is a significant improvement. We allowed more fans a place to sit, where as last year the grassy bank was filled with people, even going up in the tree line. It allowed us to sell more season tickets,” Lovins said. “The improved facilities helped, so it is a safer stadium with one much larger exit. Of course, we have the improved restrooms, which eliminated a lot of the Port-A-Johns. It also allowed us better customer service with shorter lines, and next year will be even better.”

During the off-season, the university plans to add more restrooms by the south side of the stadium under the scoreboard.

The new field house, press boxes and luxury seats will be completed by next summer, as well. A new chancellor’s box is currently in the works, along with club seating for donors to the Yosef Club and premium seating for Yosef Club members. Eighteen suites will be included in the new building.

New athletic administration offices will be housed in the 105,000-square-foot field house, with a new locker room and weight training facilities.