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By Sharron Hannon
shannon@uga.edu
Students, faculty and staff are invited to attend a Sept. 1 ceremony marking the official  groundbreak-ing for the new Student Learning Center, a $43 million, 200,000- square-foot building that will rise in the center of campus on the former parking lot south of the Fine Arts Building and west of the University Bookstore.
President Michael F. Adams, joined by Provost Karen Holbrook, will preside over the 10 a.m. ceremony, which will be held at the Tate Student Center Plaza, near the construction site.
“This will be a very prominent building on our campus and its location is significant, for it symbolically reflects that learning is at the center of everything we do,” says Adams.
Garrett Gravesen, president of the Student Government Association, and University Librarian William Potter also will take part in the ceremony, says Tom Bowen, assistant vice president in the Office of Academic Affairs, who is in charge of arrangements for the event.
The four-story student learning center, projected for completion by 2003, will house 25 classrooms of varying sizes offering a total of 2,200 classroom seats.
The building also will contain an electronic teaching library that will seat some 2,400 in varying groupings and offer access to a wide range of electronic information. It will include 500 public-access computers and additional connections for personal laptop computers.
“The library will emphasize electronic resources, but there will also be a traditional reading room on the third floor with a collection of books targeted to undergraduate education,” says Potter. “While it is a high-tech facility, it will have a very traditional appearance, with wood tables and chairs.”
The library will also feature 95 group-study rooms, where students can study together or work on collaborative projects. Other features will include several information desks where students can seek assistance, specialized classrooms for training in finding and using information and a coffee house.
“As you go through the building there’s a progression from more classrooms on the lower floors to more library space on the upper floors, but all floors are a mix of classrooms and library,” says Paul Cassilly, the architect from the Office of University Architects who has served as project manager. “The integration of library and classroom space will make the building a gathering place for faculty and students.”
University Computing and Networking Services and the Office of Instructional Support and Development participated in the planning and will have staff available in the building to provide technical assistance.
Architectural elements of the building will echo North Campus, says Cassilly. “You’ll see elements like colonnades, pilasters and scale progression,” he says, “but it is a larger building and a contemporary building, so some new precedents will be set.”
Formal entry to the building will be from the south side, which will face a new quadrangle. A second building across the quad, not yet designed or funded but planned for the parking lot where Stegeman Hall once stood, will form phase II of the project. On the north side of the building, the main entrance will open to a loggia on the fourth floor, which will become a pedestrian bridge connecting to the second building, once it is built.
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