May 17, 2007
Meetings set for HUB master plan
After 31 meetings with hundreds of members of the UW community, representatives of Perkins + Will return to campus next week to give their impressions of what a revamped Husky Union Building might be. Perkins + Will is the architectural firm that has been contracted to produce a master plan for the HUB — a project that could involve anything from interior renovation to a whole new building.
Student needs have changed and the HUB’s infrastructure has not kept up, said Paul Zuchowski, associate director of student activities and union facilities, which is why staff began thinking about doing a master plan two years ago.
“The number of student organizations has increased and there’s not enough meeting space, Zuchowski said. “Plus the spaces we have for events aren’t flexible. There isn’t much between 7,000 square feet and 1,400 square feet. The building isn’t air conditioned, and there are issues of access because the elevators don’t go to all the floors.”
Beyond that, Zuchowski said, people frequently complain that it’s hard to find one’s way around the building, which was built in three major segments — in 1949, 1952 and 1975, with some additions in the 1960s.
“We decided we needed to look at the building as a whole, as opposed to making small remodels,” he said.
With $125,000 from the Student Activities Fee Committee and $250,000 from Student Activities and Union Facilities Department money, staff went looking for an architectural firm to produce a master plan. Perkins + Will, a firm with a lot of experience building and renovating student unions, was chosen from among 11 firms that submitted proposals.
B. Jeffrey Stebar, a principal of the firm who chaired the meetings here, said Perkins + Will has a standard planning format they follow which can be adapted to different campuses. The first meetings, he said, are an attempt to build consensus around a set of goals and objectives.
“We want to know what the unique qualities of the campus are, what makes Washington Washington,” he said.
The meetings during Stebar’s first visit were with everyone from freshmen to the President, and he started by asking participants very open-ended questions — what are the strengths and weaknesses of the current HUB, what would the ideal building contain, what sort of aesthetic would you want it to have, and yes, what is unique about the UW?
“What we’re going for is what we call a benchmark statement,” Stebar said. “That’s a general statement of what people want that guides our process.”
Next week, Stebar and his colleagues will report back on what they heard and present a preliminary benchmark statement. There will be two open sessions — one for students at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 22 in the East Ballroom and one for faculty and staff at 9 a.m. Wednesday, May 23 in 106B. The architects will also meet with the steering committee for the project, a 20-member group that includes 13 students, four staff members and two faculty. That meeting will include an eco-charette to discuss sustainability for the building.
Stebar said he hadn’t yet boiled down the comments made during the 31 first-round meetings, but participants overwhelmingly talked about a connection with the natural environment and expressed a desire to open the building up — bringing in more light, taking advantage of views and making it more obvious where things are located.
As for what should be in the building, there were many opinions about that. Zuchowski jokes that if everyone got what they asked for, the building would need to be 600,000 square feet, more than double its current size. Stebar and company will be presenting a draft list of space requirements and a preliminary plan for how the various pieces could be organized.
The architects are scheduled to return over the summer with refined conceptual diagrams, cost estimates and ideas for how construction should be phased. The final master plan will be completed by fall.
“We’ll be including three options in the final plan,” Stebar said. “We’ll essentially be saying, ‘for this amount of money you can get this; for this [higher] amount you can get this,’ and so forth.”
What will happen from there depends upon students’ willingness to have their student activity fee increased to cover the cost of a renovation. The Student Activities Fee Committee would have to approve funds first for completing drawings and then for construction itself. Zuchowski said 2009 is likely the earliest that actual construction could get under way.
