The expansion of the Ferguson Center and a new recreational center are among the highlights of future construction on campus, said to University planner and designer Dan Wolfe.
“The Ferguson project is a $33 to $35 million expansion,” Wolfe said. “We’re expanding the bookstore, office and office meeting space. The building was built in the 1970s, so the mechanical systems also need to be updated.”
The 58,000 square-foot expansion of the Ferguson Center will start in the next few months and is projected to take two years to complete.
“The expansion will be toward Woods Quad,” Wolfe said. “We will continue to operate the Ferguson Center. They’ll do the addition first, move people into the addition and then go back to the older area.”
Phase II of the construction by Presidential Village includes plans to build a new recreational center, to be completed fall 2014.
“This recreational center will be a smaller facility,” Wolfe said. “It is intended to be a regional recreational center for all the surrounding student housing.”
Avery Thomas, a freshman living in Presidential Village, said he would use a recreational center closer to his dorm but thinks it will get crowded easily.
“Since the new one will be closer to all of the residential buildings, I think that it would become just as congested as the current recreational center is,” Thomas said. “People would be less willing to go use the old one when they have one within a five-minute walk.”
Wolfe said he hopes the new recreational center will alleviate some of the crowds at the current recreational center.
“It will hopefully relieve a lot of the current traffic at the recreational center off of University Boulevard,” he said.
At the September UA Board of Trustees meeting, a new master plan was presented to update the 2007 plan, Wolfe said.
“The master plan looks about 10 to 15 years in the future, but we update that master plan every five years,” he said. “We presented the 2012 plan, an update to the 2007 plan, at the September Board meeting and hope they will approve it at the November meeting.”
Along with the Ferguson Center expansion and phase II of the Presidential Village, the Board approved the Stage I submission for a $15 million Riverside parking deck project, which will consist of approximately 564 parking spaces making the total capacity 1,237 spaces, according to the project summary report from the meeting.
“The west half of the Riverside East parking lot will be developed to include an approximately 200,358 gross square feet parking deck that will increase the available parking spaces for students, faculty and staff,” according to the project summary.
