A team of Trustees, administrators, faculty and students selected Grimshaw Architects as the firm that will renovate the West Union Building.
Grimshaw, a firm with offices in New York, London, Melbourne and Sydney, will be responsible for the renovations, which are scheduled to begin summer 2013, said Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education. The team will be led by Mark Husser, managing partner of the company’s New York office, who has also worked on the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis.
“I was part of the selection process, and we all agreed that we had some great architects,” Nowicki said. “Obviously, people want to work at Duke because of its top-rate architecture—old and new. Grimshaw had some particularly creative ideas about how to connect old and new.”
Grimshaw was selected from a group of four firms, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask wrote in an email Thursday.
Husser and other representatives from Grimshaw could not be reached for comment.
The renovated building will be expanding slightly onto the West Campus Plaza to provide more space for dining, group meetings and activities, Nowicki noted. A temporary events pavilion will house the offices and dining facilities that will be displaced as a result of the construction.
West Union is expected to be out of use until Fall 2015, said Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta.
Nowicki added that although Duke’s architecture—including West Union—is beautiful on the outside, it is often closed and narrow inside.
“West Union is a Gothic building,” he said. “The trick is to take that Gothic shell and, on the inside, turn it into something that’s very open, very connected, very bright. That’s the kind of creativity that’s needed.... Grimshaw had some creative ideas on how to do that.”
The renovation for the building will be funded by the Charlotte-based Duke Endowment, which pledged $80 million to renovate Baldwin Auditorium, Page Auditorium and the West Union Building.
The original concept for the renovated building was conceived by Shepley Bulfinch, an architecture and design firm based in Boston, Phoenix and San Francisco, Moneta said.
“We’re trying to figure out where [Grimshaw] is picking up from Shepley Bulfinch’s work,” Moneta said. “What we don’t want to do is backtrack and go back to square one.”
He added that in the next few weeks, Trask will work on negotiating a contract with Grimshaw. They will discuss how the firm will utilize the ideas that were developed by Shepley Bulfinch.
The administration is not expecting drawings from Grimshaw for at least a month, Trask added.
Although construction is supposed to begin summer 2013, Nowicki said he would not be surprised if the project experienced delays.
“There are all sorts of unknowables,” Nowicki said. “That’s actually kind of a rapid timeline.... We’re moving fast on this, and I couldn’t honestly say that the timeline won’t slip. Nobody wants it to slip, but you just never know.”
Anna Koelsch contributed reporting.
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