February 11, 2005
Trustees approve Purdue residence hall, veterinary medicine projects
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The Purdue University Board of Trustees today (Friday, Feb. 11) voted to approve construction of a student housing complex to replace some of the residence hall rooms being taken out of service.
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The trustees also approved building a radiation therapy facility for the university's School of Veterinary Medicine, the purchase of scientific equipment for the Birck Nanotechnology Center and two renovation projects at Earhart Hall.
The new housing complex will be located at the former location of Fowler Courts, across State Street from Discovery Park. Ernest F. Poland, executive director of University Residences, said the facility will include approximately 560 single-student rooms with private bathrooms. The rooms, which will be arranged into clusters of 10 or 12, will partially replace bed space lost to other campus construction projects.
Each cluster of the approximately 140-square-foot rooms will share a living room and kitchenette. Every two clusters will share a study lounge and laundry room.
"The new facility will primarily house upperclassmen," Poland said. "Our older students are looking for living experiences combining the conveniences, amenities and community life of traditional residence halls with greater independence and privacy. The new facility will combine the two."
Also included in the project will be a central community center consisting of conference rooms, a multipurpose room, computer lab, student club rooms, mail center and administrative offices.
The project's site is currently a parking lot, and those parking spaces will be relocated in an addition planned for the McCutcheon Drive Parking Garage.
The new housing facility will partially replace rooms lost by Cary Quadrangle renovations, the razing of parts of Purdue Village and the elimination of student housing in Young Hall. Taking into account the future loss of more apartments in Purdue Village and part of the Hilltop Apartments, the university will have about 2,000 fewer beds to offer than it did 25 years ago, Poland said.
The housing complex is budgeted at $60 million and will be paid for by selling bonds, which in turn would be repaid through housing fees. The University Residences system is entirely self-supporting and receives no money from the state or tuition. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2006 and be completed in August 2008.
The university houses more than 11,000 students on its West Lafayette campus in 15 residence facilities: Cary Quadrangle, Earhart Hall, Harrison Hall, Hawkins Hall, Hillenbrand Hall, Hilltop Apartments, McCutcheon Hall, Meredith Hall, Owen Hall, Purdue Village, Shreve Hall, Tarkington Hall, Wiley Hall, Windsor Halls and Young Hall. Purdue houses more students than any other university that does not require students to live on campus.
The board also approved hiring Kettelhut Construction, of Lafayette, Ind., to build a 2,300-square-foot veterinary medicine radiation therapy facility attached to the southeast corner of Lynn Hall. The $1.4 million facility is scheduled to be completed in early 2006 and will be paid for with a combination of gifts and university funds.
The facility will add radiation therapy using a linear accelerator to the list of cancer treatment options for the School of Veterinary Medicine's program in comparative oncology, which is the study and treatment of cancer in pet animals that leads to better understanding, treatment and prevention of similar cancer in humans. Currently, the school's comparative oncology program has the ability to treat veterinary cancer patients with surgery, chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy and certain forms of immunotherapy.
The radiation therapy unit will allow Purdue to do research on combination therapy, joining radiation therapy with other therapies for the treatment of a number of cancers. Veterinarians in the School's Veterinary Teaching Hospital see about 1,000 dogs and cats with cancer per year.
The heart of the radiation therapy facility, the linear accelerator, targets cancerous tissue with therapeutic levels of highly focused radiation. The vault that contains the linear accelerator will have walls that are three feet thick in order to form an adequate radiation shield around the treatment area.
Other features of the facility will include:
• an animal holding/recovery area for up to 14 small animals,
• a control area where veterinarians and veterinary technicians manage the operation of the machine,
• an induction-treatment area to prepare animals for the procedure, and
• a film developing room, and a planning room in which computer models will be built to plan the treatment that will deliver dosages as accurately and rapidly as possible.
In other business, trustees approved two purchases of specialized research equipment for the Birck Nanotechnology Center. The first includes $1.5 million in accessories for specialty transmission microscopes. The equipment includes a specialty electron detector, specimen holders, filter systems and an automated lens and systems controller. The equipment will be purchased from FEI Inc., in Barrington, Ill., and paid for with gift funds.
Also for the Nanotechnology Center, trustees approved using $2.5 million in gift funds to buy an electron beam lithography system from Leica Microsystems Inc., in Oakdale, Calif. The system will allow for specific types of heat measurement.
The Birck Nanotechnology Center, part of Discovery Park, will include flexible laboratory space that can be shifted and changed to accommodate various interdisciplinary research projects in nanotechnology, which focuses on building minute devices and systems atom by atom. The center is expected to open later this year.
The board also approved two projects to upgrade Earhart Hall that will be completed during the summer. D.A. Dodd, of Rolling Prairie, Ind., will be the general contractor for a $2 million project to install air conditioning in student rooms in the hall's west wing. The company also will upgrade the west wing's fire protection and sprinkler system.
For the second project, the trustees voted to hire contractor Jungclaus-Campbell Co. Inc., of Indianapolis, to renovate student rooms in the residence hall's east wing. The upgrades will include painting, installing new ceiling tiles and enlarging closets. This work, with a budget of $1.6 million, is in preparation for installing air conditioners and a fire protection system in the east wing during the summer of 2006.
University Residences repair and renovation funds will pay for both projects.
Writer: Matt Holsapple, (765) 494-2073, mholsapple@purdue.edu
Sources: Morgan R. Olsen, executive vice president and treasurer, (765) 494-9705, mrolsen@purdue.edu
Ernest F. Poland, (765) 494-1000, efpoland@purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
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