The University has hired Raleigh architect Clymer Cease to help with preliminary planning for the West Campus student village.
Cease and his associates have been meeting regularly with administrators - including University Architect John Pearce, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta and Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Zoila Airall - for the past several weeks, focusing primarily on a proposed outdoor plaza that administrators hope will become a crossroads for community interaction.
The group is basing its work on a report completed in the spring by Washington, D.C., firm Brailsford & Dunlavey, and hopes to have general designs by the end of summer or early fall.
Cease has been charged with crafting a conceptual approach to the Village. This includes thinking about where the plaza should be located, how it should relate to existing buildings, how buildings might be changed and where additional square footage might be placed, said Coordinator for Space Management and Planning Roger Belanger.
Cease said planning is going well so far and that the main focus has been to create a more student-friendly space with the Village.
"It's obvious there's a demand there that's not being met the way things are currently configured," Cease said. "The idea is that we know there are a lot of things that students would like to see. We've gotten a lot of really interesting ideas, and I think we'll be able to do something that will actually improve the services and how students perceive the whole area."
He added, however, that he is not necessarily planning a drastic overhaul of the area. "We are not trying to overlay something just because we think it would be cool," he said. "We're trying to understand what the problem is and trying to figure out how to fix that problem.... It's all very deliberate."
Moneta said he is confident in Cease's abilities to work through the B & D report, which makes recommendations regarding renovations and additions to the Bryan Center, West Union Building, Flowers Building and Page Auditorium. The report recommends allocating square footage between such services as food, retail and meeting and social space, but does not speculate on where each service should be situated within the Village.
"[Cease] immediately understood the importance of the piazza/plaza to this project," Moneta wrote in an e-mail. "We've been pretty heavily focused first on the plaza. That has led to discussions on the multi-purpose spaces, bar/pub/dance club options and student organization office space."
Cease is no stranger to the University, having worked on a number of Duke projects over the last decade, including renovations to Lilly Library and the School of Law. Cease is also familiar with Village-type planning, as his firm, Pearce Brinkley Cease & Lee, has done previous work on other student centers.
Airall called the firm's designs for other student centers "beautiful." She added that Cease has a good understanding of the University's needs and dreams for the new Village.
Once the University agrees on a conceptual approach to the Village, the project will move to the next phase, which will include a more concrete timetable, proposed budgets and a decision on an architect to make the final designs for the buildings.
"An architect once said to me that the time is not always right to have a project move forward into its final design, but as you work through it, it will speak to you," Pearce said.
"At this point, we haven't imposed too many financial restrictions since the assignment is basically to develop some broad conceptions," Moneta wrote. "It gets much harder once a dollar limitation is expressed."
Moneta said he hopes to be ready to develop a first-phase proposed project in time for the October meeting of the Board of Trustees.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.