Ohio State is in the middle of what officials call a $171.6 million shortcut to make room for more students on South Campus.
The project — dubbed the South Campus High Rise Renovation and Addition Project — will connect Park to Stradley, and Steeb to Smith, creating rooms for 360 more students by August 2013.
“It’s basically building another building in between these two buildings,” said Scott Conlon, director of projects for Facilities Design and Construction.
One such building will serve as a central lobby for Park and Stradley, and a similar building will provide a lobby to Steeb and Smith. Besides the new lobby and extra residence rooms in the existing towers, the project will add lounges and study rooms to the dormitories.
“We’re doing all these buildings, all these additional student rooms, at what it would normally cost just to renovate rooms,” Conlon said. “If you were building all those beds in a new spot, you would have to build all the infrastructure around it, too.”
A new building would require new elevators and other costs that this project cuts, Conlon said.
Officials realized they would need more campus space for students to accompany the university’s plan to enroll more students in coming years.
“The goal is to get more high-caliber students here on campus,” said Molly Ranz Calhoun, assistant vice president of Student Life. “If we increase enrollment, we have to increase beds.”
The project will also add cooling systems to the high-rise buildings, because students will move into the halls earlier in the summer — when it’s typically hotter — once the university switches to semesters in summer 2012, Conlon said.
“The high-rises are barely OK right now,” he said.
First-year Michael Lawson, who lives on the eighth floor of Steeb, agreed with Conlon and said he “would rather not even think about living here in August” without air conditioning.
“Oh my God, the first couple weeks it was sweltering in here,” Lawson said. “Air conditioning would have been great those first two weeks.”
Geothermal wells will power the new heating and cooling systems in the buildings, said Cihangir Calis, senior project manager for Facilities Operations and Development.
The wells will use less energy and require less maintenance than a conventional heating and cooling system, but their upfront cost will likely exceed that of a conventional system by more than $3 million.
Officials said they didn’t know how much the wells will cost. But to drill 450 wells to a depth of 550 to 600 feet, “somewhere just a little over $7.3 million is the published estimate that contractors are working with,” Calis said.
He said contractors would give the university an estimate Wednesday.
A conventional heating and cooling system would have cost about $4 million upfront, Calis said, but the geothermal system will save the university approximately $210,000 per year in energy and maintenance costs compared with a conventional system.
After the geothermal wells are drilled beneath the South Oval, landscaping crews will conceal them below ground.
“We’ll be redoing the sidewalks, relocating the lights,” Conlon said. “We’ll be doing some infrastructural improvements to allow for the concerts and stuff like that.”
Conlon said there isn’t a sidewalk wide or strong enough to support trucks and other utility vehicles that need to access the South Oval for special events.
“Every time we set something up, we do damage and have to spend money to fix it,” Conlon said. “We’re doing a few tweaks to the South Oval so we can support that type of traffic.”
Crews will also drill geothermal wells beneath the Hale Hall Parking Lot, which will be turned into a field to give South Campus a “green view,” Calis said.
Sarah Blouch, director for Transportation and Parking Services, said that losing the parking lot won’t cut down parking spaces on campus.
“As the central campus becomes more dense, proximity parking will have to be in garages,” Blouch said. “They have available parking at all times of the day right now.”
She said that losing the 66 parking spots in the Hale Hall lot won’t make a dent in the university’s 36,466 on-campus parking spaces.
During the renovation process, the number of undergraduate beds on campus will decrease, Calhoun said, but the university will take measures to continue accommodating students.
“We may take some doubles and make them triples and take some triples and make them quads,” Calhoun said. “We’ll place returning students, and then freshmen are second and then transfer students. Sometimes transfer students who don’t have to live on campus get turned away.”
Calhoun said changing the number of students housed in a room together is not unusual; it happens every year depending on enrollment.
Stradley and Park will be closed from September 2011 to August 2012, temporarily eliminating 816 beds, Calhoun said, which is more than 8 percent of OSU’s total 9,936 undergraduate beds.
Stradley and Park will reopen in August 2012 with about 180 new beds.
Steeb, Smith and Siebert will be closed from June 2012 to August 2013, temporarily eliminating abound 1,096 beds, Calhoun said. But in August 2012, the Hall Complex extension will open, providing about 530 new beds to mitigate the effect of closing the other three halls.
Steeb and Smith will reopen with around 180 new beds, but because Siebert is a stand-alone hall and will undergo only internal renovations, it will not gain any beds when they all reopen in August 2013.
Part of the university’s motivation for this project was to move toward a more “green” campus, Conlon said, which is part of the reason geothermal wells were chosen to power the halls’ heating and cooling systems.
Chris Skovron, president of Students for a Sustainable Campus, was enthusiastic about the project but said there’s still a lot to be done to make campus more sustainable.
“They’re putting in geothermal wells, which is really innovative and something we haven’t done for residence halls,” Skovron said. “I’m confident the university knows the direction in which it needs to move, and we just need all parties to be committed enough for us to continue our progress.”
