Construction of the new Carlson School of Management facility motivated a University committee to evaluate how rooms will be utilized after the school’s staff and students vacate several West Bank buildings next year.
Monitoring how buildings are used at the University is not a new phenomenon, but a visit to the Rarig Center last Friday by Space Advisory Committee members Florence Funk and Marvin Marshak served a specific purpose.
“The new building is the big incentive that’s causing a whole new re-examination of space on the West Bank,” Marshak said.
Michael Houston, a professor in the Carlson School’s Department of Marketing and Logistics Management and former associate dean, said the new building, expected to be occupied by winter of 1997, will have a big effect on University space. “It will lessen the tension of the current space situation on the West Bank,” he said.
Currently, more than 350 of the school’s staff members are spread throughout four buildings on the West Bank, including the Hubert H. Humphrey Center and the Management and Economics Building.
The reassignment of space on the West Bank is more a necessity than an option for the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance.
The department has been asked to move its offices out of Middlebrook Hall so that dorm rooms can be created to meet the growing demand for residential living space, said Lance Brockman, chairman of the theater department.
Kelli McLoud, director of Middlebrook Hall, said that though there is no deadline for the theater department’s move, any time during the spring would be ideal. That way, summer construction could end by the fall.
The theater department’s 23-year occupancy and $122,000-a-year rent to Middlebrook Hall would end by June 1997 at the earliest, Brockman said.
He said having offices in Middlebrook Hall has not been user-friendly because the location is not as accessible to students.
“We want to move some place where it advances our agenda,” Brockman said. He said the ideal place for the theater department would be on the fifth and sixth floors of Rarig Center because that is where the department’s classrooms and laboratories are located.
Units of University Media Resources, including Radio K, occupy most of the space on those floors.
Sheldon Goldstein, director of media resources, said he does not know if there is enough room to condense the space used by his department.
“There is a lot of activity here, a lot of staff and students,” Goldstein said. Currently, 41 staff and students use the space.
Some speech department offices as well as some journalism and speech department classrooms are also located on these floors.
Funk and Marshak’s visit to the Rarig Center did not result in a determination of whether or not the building holds any available space for new classrooms and offices, Funk said. “Today’s visit was to get a feel for the spaces on the West Bank.”
Committee members will continue visits to the campus throughout the year and will decide how to use the buildings, Funk said. Some older buildings on campus will be closed down as a result.
Funk said no final decisions have been made, but Jones and Nicholson halls on the East Bank are top possibilities for demolition.