By Beth Roberts
UGA’s new student-learning center will rise four stories in the center of campus, on a site that is now a parking lot south of the Fine Arts Building and west of the University Bookstore, according to university planners and administrators overseeing the project. They presented plans and a model at a media briefing Feb. 19.
 Funding for the $43 million building is included in the proposed state supplemental budget for fiscal year 1999. Construction is scheduled to begin in spring 2000.
“It will be a very prominent building on our campus, and it will touch the life of every university undergraduate,” said Danny Sniff, director of the Office of University Architects. “It’s a classroom building that also has a state-of-the-art electronic library component.”
The building will hold 25 classrooms, varying in size from 24 seats to 300, for a total of 2,200 classroom seats. In addition there will be 2,500 library seats, also in varying groupings. Both classrooms and library areas will be wired for connectivity to campus networks. Computers and printers will be available in study areas, as well as connections for laptops brought from home.
“As you go up 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 classroom and library,” said Paul Cassilly, the architect from the Office of University Architects who has served as project manager. “The integration of library and classroom space makes the building a gathering place for faculty and students.”
In addition to large spaces for library use, there will be about 100 small “group-study areas,” where four to eight students can work together on a project.
“We think students need to work in collaborative ways, and we often see them working in groups,” said Bill Potter, University Librarian, “so we wanted to give them space to do that.” Potter said he had looked at new libraries around the country, where he regularly heard librarians wish more group-study space was available. “We’re not sure that 100 rooms will be enough,” he said, “but it’s far more than anyone else is offering at this point.”
There will also be a library information desk and a traditional reading room--complete with reference books--on the fourth floor. A coffee shop is also planned.
University Computing and Networking Services and the Office of Instructional Services and Design have participated in the planning, and both offices will have staff available in the building to help with problems.
“In many ways this is a first for us,” said Potter, “a lot of collaboration between the library, UCNS and OISD. I think it speaks well for the process.”
Architectural elements will echo North Campus, according to Cassilly.
 “Elements of North Campus are picked up--colonnades, pilasters, scale progression, and perhaps indigenous materials like Elbert County granite--but it is a larger building and a contemporary building, so some new precedents will be set,” Cassilly said.
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 central precinct 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.
Putting a building dedicated to teaching and learning in the center of campus has symbolic importance, said Tom Dyer, University Professor and interim associate provost. “If it’s going to be in the center of campus physically, it should also be in the center in terms of what it reflects--the central values of a university, the values of the mind.”
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