It Burned Coal for Decades. Now It Will Let Beloit Students Blow Off Steam.
Beloit, Wis. — More than a decade ago, Alliant Energy began preparing to shut down Wisconsin Power & Light’s big Blackhawk generating station on the Rock River here. The company anticipated demolishing the enormous structure at considerable cost, but Scott Bierman had a better idea. Bierman, newly installed as president of neighboring Beloit College, proposed that the company spend its money making the site safe for reuse and then give it to the college, which would turn it into a student center.
For a small liberal-arts college with a modest endowment, it was quite a gamble. But Beloit needed a modern campus center and a new field house, and its residence halls and science complex are just up the hill from the power plant. Alliant officials liked the idea, and the college hired Jeanne Gang’s architecture firm, Studio Gang, to plan the conversion.
Now the main part of the project is within a few weeks of opening. The Powerhouse, as the complex will be known, will house the campus center and fitness facility, and will have a dining, lounge, and study space, a 160-seat auditorium, a game room, a top-floor event space, and a running track suspended from the gantry that supports the building’s gantry crane (the crane has been used during the renovation but is being decommissioned). Opening later will be the swimming pool, currently under construction in the oldest part of the building, and a new field house sheathed in polycarbonate but taking design hints from the older structure.
Considering its size — 124,000 square feet of renovated space, plus 17,000 new — the Powerhouse is a remarkable bargain for Beloit. Dan Schooff, the project manager, says the total cost will be about $50 million, of which only $28 million will have come from the college. Alliant’s contribution to preparing the site and about $10 million of federal and state historic-preservation and other tax credits make up the rest. The Powerhouse is also designed to use water from the river for cooling, which will keep down operating costs in the warm months.
Juliane Wolf, who has led the Studio Gang team working on the project, says it was “such an interesting brief, a transformation from a coal-burning to a calorie-burning facility.” The architects found themselves facing a structure with an “incredibly strong steel armature — it looked to us like a giant jungle gym.” The turbines and boilers were gone, but a few reminders of the building’s long service were left as mementos — control panels with a decidedly retro look, coal pulverizers, giant intake pipes for river water, and a pair of coal hoppers suspended from the upper level that are “big enough to have programming.” (A plan to put a climbing wall in one has been shelved to keep costs down.)
Since the college was seeking preservation credits, few changes could be made to the exterior, but the interior offered nearly unlimited possibilities. The vast turbine hall will become dining and lounge space, with the 7,000-square-foot fitness area above and the suspended running track passing through the main hall and into the new field house. (It was supposed to loop through the pool area as well, but the turbine hall’s end wall turned out to be full of structural steel.)
One level down, the former machine shop will have additional lounge space and a flexible stage for small performances. The lower level will also have the auditorium and a game room dominated by the preserved intake pipes. Meanwhile, the top floor will become a space for parties or conferences. Undecided as of a few weeks ago was whether the view up the 100-foot steel smokestack could be preserved.
The preservation credits require that many of the windows be restored rather than replaced, but much of the brickwork inside the building will be hidden by new walls that cover essential insulation. Still, says Wolf, the building will “keep some memory of what happened here before” in its details and colors, including a fair amount of matte black. Students attended many planning meetings, she says, and made it clear they didn’t want spaces that seemed “precious” — a goal, she says, that was “easy to accommodate in a building as raw as this.”
The opening is forecast for sometime this fall, with the pool following this winter and the field house in late winter or early spring. Still in the planning phase is a walkway on the river side of the building that will connect to a city trail network.
In Chicago, a Precedent-Shattering Campus Center Is as Busy as Ever
Back in 2003, the Illinois Institute of Technology opened a campus center that had lessons for anyone interested in campus facilities. Not only was the exterior extraordinary — appearing to deflect beneath the weight of a stainless-steel tube enclosing the tracks of Chicago’s el trains — but the interior was, frankly, garish. Orange walls met ceilings that looked unfinished; a row of computers occupied what seemed to be a red gash in the floor; a glassed-in garden was suspended over a food court; and a set of glass doors opened in the middle of a giant, pixelated portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, once the institution’s dean of architecture, who designed many of its buildings.
The building, the McCormick Tribune Campus Center, was designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which had won an international competition sponsored by the institute. It was Koolhaas’s first American commission.
Having written about it not long after it opened, I was curious to see how it was holding up to changing student tastes — this year’s freshmen, after all, were toddlers in 2003. I can report that at lunchtime it was as crowded as any student-affairs dean could hope. The game tables placed in mid-corridor were surrounded by users, the food court was busy and noisy, and nearly every table and grouping of chairs was occupied. That is a testament to the design, but also to the genius of its location at the intersection of the footpaths that students had worn across what was more or less a no man’s land between the two sides of the campus. What’s more, it’s remarkably porous — students can, and do, walk through the building on their way to and from class.
If you’re thinking about building a student center — or any building primarily for students — you ought to visit this one first.
On Campuses and Beyond
Carla Yanni, a professor of art history at Rutgers University, has an essay on the Smithsonian website titled “How College Dorms Evolved to Fit America’s Gender and Racial Politics.” Yanni, who earlier this year publishedLiving on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory, says students should stop and think about their residence halls. “What possibilities does it offer? Does it reinforce class and race divisions, or does it break down social expectations?” Read more.
A construction project at Wellesley College has come under fire from a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for using a nonunion subcontractor. The union said the contractor’s presence means that the college is “undermining women construction workers.” Read more.
Deborah Berke Partners has designed two residential colleges (above) for Princeton University, with a total of 1,020 beds. One will serve as swing space while existing buildings are renovated; the other will let the university increase enrollment by 500. Read more.
Hoping to save money, the University of Texas at Austin has pulled five comparatively small renovation projects into one package that it expects will be more appealing to contractors. Says Mike Carmagnola, director of project management and construction services: “We thought, ‘Why don’t we package these things all together, put it out as one lump thing over a multiyear period, and hire one person that might be interested in a larger package of projects?’” Read more.
Seismic-risk assessments ordered by the University of California system found “at least 68 seismically deficient structures at UC Berkeley and 18 at UCLA.” Read more.
The new Barbara Walters Campus Center (above) has opened at Sarah Lawrence College. The $35-million, 35,000-square-foot project, designed by KSS Architects, will serve as a cultural hub and new front door for the campus. Read more.
New in Print
Living Building Makers: Creating Sustainable Buildings That Renew Our Worldlooks at the people who designed and built two sustainable buildings at Hampshire College: the Hitchcock Center for the Environment and the R.W. Kern Center. Written by Jonathan A. Wright, a Hampshire alumnus and principal of the company that built the buildings, the book blends tales of decision making with explanations of construction details, work-site vignettes, and profiles of many of those involved. It will be available at the end of September for $29.99 through the International Living Future Institute.
Lastly …
A Beloit biology professor, Yaffa Grossman, has pushed the college to create campus pollinator gardens. The gardens include a mix of plants, so something is always blooming during the growing season. This one, by the science building, shares space with an oak savanna and with remnants of a former science building that have been made into garden furniture.
