The University is plotting more than $100 million worth of construction on Central--the beginning of a decades-long, $1 billion project that could increase the square footage of campus by 50 percent.
With a year of facilities planning already underway, the time has come to officially ponder what Central Campus should become.
The University is plotting more than $100 million worth of construction on Central—the beginning of a decades-long, $1 billion project that could increase the square footage of campus by 50 percent. If the Board of Trustees approves the proposals this weekend, administrators will establish several committees to consider what exactly should fill the shells of the buildings that architects have already started to design.
New undergraduate housing, which will replace the apartments currently on Central, is the only staple of the development so far. Whatever else gets built on Central will initially stem from the needs of the older students living there. Administrators also plan to use the wholesale construction project to invigorate geographical and intellectual connections across campus.
“This has enormous potential to fix a lot of issues that relate to East Campus and Central Campus, West Campus, the quality of undergraduate experience and other facilities that are not in particularly good shape,” Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said.
Several committees, which will include faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, will examine issues such as financing, transportation and safety, housing options and co-curricular activities. Each will present a no-holds-barred report about what should be part of the new Central. A senior planning group will then attempt to fuse the wish lists into a single vision before administrators give the committees practical constraints.
Construction could begin as soon as summer of 2005, but bulldozers will likely not start digging the foundations until 2006. The delay is rooted in a desire to make Central a unifying force rather than simply a place to move things that need new buildings—the career center, the alumni center, the bookstore and Uncle Harry’s grocery store.
Since undergraduate housing is currently anchoring the project, administrators are working to articulate a four-year vision of residence life that would begin with a freshman experience on East Campus and culminate in apartment-style living on Central during the junior and senior years. President Richard Brodhead has called the early conception a “growth model” where West Campus would serve as a transitional ground.
“This would be an absolute Duke specialty,” he said.
Although the University is waiting to see what students want before it makes final decisions, the housing component of Central will likely consist of a variety of options including multi-bedroom apartments with commons and cooking spaces and hallways of individual studio apartments with kitchenettes.
Whereas the current Central Campus is relatively isolated from the activities of the University, the new Central will house some activities to draw people to the destination point. It will also integrate spaces for academic activity with residential life.
In part to keep the academic mission of the construction at the center of the planning process, Provost Peter Lange is overseeing the discussion about what will fill Central.
“[We’re] trying to think through how both our residential and curricular and co-curricular experiences can all contribute to, on the one hand, a strong community, but also with regard to undergraduates and their maturation,” Lange said. “Our campus experience should integrate with that.”
Central will eventually bring together several areas of the University that operate financially independently of one another. Because of this, the money for the renovations will come from a variety of sources, Trask said. He noted, however, that all the funding must be newly generated because the University does not currently have enough in reserve to support the project. Some of the cost will be covered through donations, but Trask said it is likely that the University will eventually take out loans for substantial portions of the project.
Residence life, a subset of student affairs, will foot the bill for the new housing. At first, the housing is primarily designed for undergraduates, but eventually graduate student housing will probably be built as well. In part to pay for these improvements, the University will alter the cost of existing Central Campus apartments.
“All we’re doing is beginning to gently ratchet up the rates to be more consistent with the market so that that we’re in a position as we get closer to beginning construction to be able to afford it,” said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs, noting that in the long term, housing costs across the University will become more standard.
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