A week after the grand opening of Mill Village on Central Campus, Duke kicked off another project designed to improve residential life.
Students gathered on Keohane Quadrangle Friday to watch President Richard Brodhead and Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education, break ground on the planned K4 residence hall.
The ceremony, which included free frisbees and plastic hard hats that read, “I built K4,” marked the beginning of construction on the first new residence hall since Bell Tower Residence Hall was completed in 2006. It was also Brodhead’s third ground-breaking this year—the first two were for the cancer center at Duke Hospital and for the campus in Kunshan, China.
“You build buildings to enable what can happen in that building,” Brodhead said in his speech Friday. “For China it is to spread Duke all over the world, for the cancer center to continue research and for K4 to expand undergraduate housing.”
The residence hall, which will be built on the grassy space behind Keohane, will complete the quad and enable conversations between administrators and students about a new housing model for the University. In some ways, K4 is a starting point for thinking about how to build New Campus, Nowicki said in a speech at the ceremony.
“Eventually, our hope is that when students move from East to West Campus, everyone will be able to live in a house [section] for all three years” Nowicki said in an interview. “Old Duke used to do that, and we are learning from what worked in the past.”
K4 will house 150 much-needed beds and be composed of two houses, Nowicki said. Each house will have a high percentage of singles and suites. Under the envisioned new housing model, sophomores would be placed mostly in doubles, and students would be able to move into singles and suites within their house as juniors and seniors.
The new model, which aims to foster community within the dorm, is currently still under development. Nowicki has worked closely with Campus Council along the way to reconceptualize the housing system and hopes to begin discussions with the student body next semester.
Representatives from Campus Council and Duke Student Government met with the K4 design architects to discuss plans for the residence hall, said Campus Council President Stephen Temple, a junior.
“The building is flexible and dynamic, it goes with both the current quad model and the new model,” he said.
It will be exciting to be able to form and maintain a sense of community over one’s Duke career under the new model, Temple said in a speech during the ceremony.
Nowicki said he envisions K4 as a new center of the campus community. The dorm will look like the buildings surrounding it with touches of modernity. It will have bigger windows, a large, two-story common room for each house and a common space that is not connected with either house. The University also hopes to update McClendon Tower and Tommy’s Rubs and Grubs restaurant, but these plans have not been finalized, Nowicki said.
The 9/11 Memorial, which commemorates Duke alumni who died during the attacks, has been moved from the Edens side of Keohane Quad to protect it during construction, Nowicki said. Once the dorm is completed, the memorial and the trees that were part of it will be returned to their original locations. The trees have been replanted in a nursery, while the memorial is being housed at an alternative location.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.