West campus is a place most students only glance at while waiting for a bus to take them away, but Ohio State is hoping to turn this remote area across the river into a haven for start-up companies that will not only bring in research dollars to the university, but turn Columbus into a technology mecca rivaling Silicon Valley.It may seem like a dream, but construction of the new Science Village building on Kinnear Road is not only on schedule, but nearing completion. It’s only the first phase of new construction for the Science and Technology Campus coming to life in the southwest quadrant of West Campus.The Science and Technology Campus Corporation (STCC) is overseeing the growth and development of the Science Research Park, of which Science Village is a part, on 53 acres of land that OSU has leased them. The corporation itself is a non-profit entity with a board of directors composed of civic, business and university leaders. The president of the Science and Technology Campus Corporation board of directors is OSU President William “Brit” Kirwan. Funding comes from the city of Columbus, the state of Ohio and OSU.The notion behind creating SciTech, as it is often referred, is to foster an environment where new and rapid growing tech-based businesses can transform academic knowledge into new products and services for the marketplace. The Science and Technology Campus provides facilities for commercial enterprises and research and development institutions that benefit from the many resources available in the university community. In return, the companies and institutions at SciTech contribute to the university`s teaching, research and service missions. “The idea is to create a mini-Silicon Valley area that is resource and network rich,” said SciTech Corporation Vice President Jim Currie. Six parcels of land comprise the initial 53-acre allotment: three parcels have existing buildings, one has a building under construction and two others are still green spaces set aside for future construction. The most noticeable of the buildings is the first phase of Science Village, with its steep angular roof line that pitches up and down creating interior spaces that allow for tall equipment to be installed below. “The architects for the building view the design as a manifestation of the way businesses will use the space,” Currie said. “Walls can go up or come down depending on the needs of the tenant. It will be very flexible space.”As the research park grows, it will cover most of the area between Lane Avenue and Kinnear Road along the edge of Upper Arlington. The third phase of construction for the Science Village will be built squarely on top of an OSU Prairie Preserve area and a forested lot, but surprisingly, nobody seems to be up in arms about the imminent development.”Actually, we’ve known about this for some time now,” said Michael Knee, a professor of horticulture and crop sciences and coordinator of the Chadwick Arboretum, which currently oversees the prairie site. “We’ve rescued all the interesting plants and moved them to the Arboretum.” Knee said that Chadwick Arboretum, a system of planned and well-tended gardens in the west campus area, inherited the prairie area from another department, but it hasn’t been used for research recently. “We keep telling the sign people they can take that one down now. We stopped claiming that area as ‘ours’ a few years ago,” he said.But the vision for the future of the Research Park is “science in a prairie,” as Currie put it. The development plan, which has been given a tentative green light by the OSU Board of Trustees, would add a series of waterways along North Star Road and locate buildings farther apart than the West Campus District Plan calls for, integrating structures into the landscape with semi-underground parking beneath each building. That way, west campus will still maintain very usable green spaces for students, faculty and area residents to enjoy on bike or on foot, but with additional paths.”We’re committed to keeping green spaces in the west campus district as part of the green reserve,” said OSU campus planner Laura Shinn. She added that the long-term development plan for west campus calls for a lower density of buildings than central campus does, but if the area is planned at too low a density, with buildings scattered about, the university will run out of room to build sooner. The Offices of the University Architect and Physical Planning still have to approve the plans for the Research Park.One of the three existing buildings leased to SciTech is the enormous warehouse at 1275 Kinnear Road, just east of the Science Village project, which is already in use as the Business and Technology Center and Incubator. Although only partially remodeled from its former life as a mattress factory, it’s being used by several tenants already. The front portion of the building has been leased and there will be an additional 30,000 square feet of space remodeled and ready to use in the next 12 months. The additional space will include new labs, office space and shared commons area for conference rooms, as well as presentation space for tenants.Another part of that same building will be separated from the main structure to create a free-standing 12,000 sq. ft. building called the “Innovation Center.” Renovations are underway and Currie hopes to see four tenants in by the end of this year. Three of those tenants will probably be flourishing businesses moving out of the “incubator” in the Business and Technology Center. The other two buildings being run by SciTech are 1224 Kinnear Road., which currently houses SciTech’s offices, as well as OSC (formerly the Ohio Supercomputer Center), and the recently renovated building at 1929 Kenny Road. The remaining two parcels are both undeveloped green spaces on the Lane Avenue edge of west campus near the new Edison Welding Institute.According to Currie, SciTech plans to expand by about 40,000 sq. ft. of new space every two years for about the next ten years, bringing total floor space to about one million square feet by the end of the decade.For those people that prefer wide open fields of tall grass, an occasional cornfield and trees to the idea of “science in a prairie,” the days of jogging through wide-open spaces are numbered.