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Home News Construction Continues on New Dunklau Center

Earlier this summer, construction crews prepare the ground by the building of the new Dunklau Center.

Photo by Ellen Beck

 

By Madison Pitsch

 

Crews broke ground for the Dunklau Center in April about two months after the project was announced at a chapel service in February, and the process has not slowed down since.

Many do not know that this addition has been a long time coming. The Science Building was constructed in 1964, and it wasn’t until 2000 that it was considered for renovation. Currently there are somewhere between 350 to 400 science majors on campus, and the new building will be built to handle close to a 20 to 25 percent growth.

“When this period of the capital campaign came around, they did a lot of research on things donors might be able to support,” Dr. Robert Hermann, professor of physics and the department chair of Natural and Computer Sciences, said. “They researched things on campus like what kinds of things we might need, and a science building was obviously floating near the top at that point.”

The summer of 2016 was spent going through a strategic planning process of the science, technology, business and math areas and how they could grow and improve those programs. Science professors spent the summer researching what kinds of things they would want in their classrooms and what they could do to improve their teaching overall.

“Actually, one of the top things that we as a faculty decided we wanted in a building was (that) we wanted space for students just to be able to sit and work, interact with one another, (and) interact with faculty, because there’s nothing like that here,” Hermann said. “You know at Concordia we’re a very close-knit community, but right now we have to do that close-knit stuff in our offices or standing in the hallways. Just to open up opportunities for relationships in that community will help the science programs do what everybody at Concordia does naturally anyway.”

Aside from opening up spaces for students, the Dunklau Center will also have classrooms oriented toward group work and more labs available for students who are doing research or internship experiences. Hermann also thinks the new building will help with recruitment.

“It will help a lot with recruiting students because it will look like a science building,” Dr. Hermann said. “We have really excellent science programs here, and our students do very well once they graduate. It’s a little bit harder to convince a high school student of that when the building is dark, dingy and dated-looking.”

Hermann says the building should still be on schedule. Structural steel will start to be put up toward the end of August, and the building should be covered by December. The plan is to move in by the spring of 2019. The old building will be renovated in the fall of 2019, and by 2020 the whole facility should be finished.

Hermann is excited for the unknown opportunities that this building will bring.

“The thing I’m most excited about it is that it will just give us opportunities to do things we’ve never thought of. We’ve been in this building for over 50 years; a number of us were students in this building. We’re used to the way that things are. Turning things on our head, having to empty out our labs and get rid of stuff we haven’t touched in 20 years—it’s gonna help our thinking,” Hermann said. “Moving into a new building with stuff that we’ve actively said, ‘Yes, this is something I want to keep, something I want to use,’ it’s gonna help us in our teaching. …The opportunities that it’s going to be able to give us are really exciting.”

Earlier this summer, construction crews prepare the ground by the building of the new Dunklau Center. Photo by Ellen Beck

Earlier this summer, construction crews prepare the ground by the building of the new Dunklau Center. Photo by Ellen Beck

Construction crews have made progress on the walls of the Dunklau Center, and the final footprint of the building is now becoming visible. Photo by Morgan Consier

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