Building community

Offices and classrooms of the South Lawn Project will boast the latest technology for teaching and research. But there’s something far simpler that
the College will gain in the new complex of buildings, something that the University’s original Academical Village provided and that human beings have sought since our earliest days: places for people to get together.

When plans for the project were first announced, history department chair Duane Osheim was worried the South Lawn could be a kind of Siberia, far from the library and a good cup of coffee. He’s not worried anymore.

The project’s glass-walled Commons building will feature café service of coffee and light meals, with seating for about 150 on two levels and a terrace. Wireless Internet access and gathering places galore are provided throughout the buildings and in the gardens that will surround them.

The office suites for each department going into the buildings — politics and religious studies will join history in Phase I — will include large and small seminar rooms that can be used for classes or workshops. A talk by a visiting speaker could be followed by a reception just steps away, either in the department’s space or in the central Commons.

“It seems to me it will make scholarly and even social interchanges more possible,” says Osheim. “Now a talk would typically be in an unused classroom, or perhaps in a nice building like Garrett Hall that unfortunately closes at 5.”

The project will “create a space that we can use in all sorts of formal and informal ways to get people together,” Osheim says. “A great problem many departments have is that there are no places you can simply congregate.”

After class in Cabell, he adds, “all you want is to get away. But when you get away, where do you go?” Graduate teaching assistants often hold their office hours in Alderman Café. The space occupied by card catalogs in the pre-computer era now has coffee service, café tables, computer stations, wireless Internet and comfortable upholstered furniture where students can read — or even nap.

Alderman is “a good model for what we would like to see happen in these public places,” he says. “They’ll provide a greater chance for students and faculty to hang around” and have the kind of casual conversations that are difficult to have now.

These gathering areas are “essential for the kind of interchange you really want to foster. It’s not sterile space,” Osheim explains. “We probably can’t even predict all the things that can happen there.

“All the high-tech stuff will make special events or lectures easier to manage, but the benefits are the low-tech ones, the ones where people can meet,” says Osheim. “Just in terms of solving problems — administrative or intellectual — if we can just get people together, things can be so much easier.”