Open house meetings set on new campus building sites

UO planners will present updated information and analyses on three sites being considered for a new classroom and faculty office building at two campus open house meetings Sept. 27.

Students, faculty members, staff and community members are invited to attend the meetings, review the materials and offer comments. Additional analysis remains to be done, and comments from the open houses will be incorporated into that work.

The sessions will be from noon to 1 p.m. in the Erb Memorial Union lobby near the Fishbowl and from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the Ford Alumni Center lobby. More information is available on the site selection web page.

The three sites under consideration, after an extensive process of consultation and collaboration, are the parking lot west of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall, the Collier House site and McArthur Court. Both reuse and new construction options are being considered for the McArthur Court site.

Also, a site selection study has begun to determine whether a good relocation site is available for the historic Collier House, should that site be chosen for the new building. A preliminary analysis of the options will be shared at the open houses.

The classroom and faculty office building is envisioned as a three- or four-story, approximately 60,000-gross-square-foot building near the academic core of campus. The project will provide approximately 750 classroom seats and about 40 faculty offices to meet existing capacity challenges and allow strategic planning for future growth.

Nine sites originally were considered. Project consultants and the Campus Planning Committee narrowed the number to five. The four sites removed from consideration had features that made them inappropriate for the project’s needs. 

The remaining five sites were analyzed in much greater detail and were the focus of an open house and a  campus planning committee meeting Aug. 7. The committee reviewed the project consultants’ analysis and confirmed that two additional sites should be removed from consideration, reducing the number to three.

The committee plans to hold a meeting early in fall term to get a progress report on the site analyses of the remaining three sites. Another meeting will be held in mid to late October for committee members to  take action on a site recommendation that will be forwarded to President Michael Schill for a final decision.