State money clears way for new $85M UMass classroom building

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

AMHERST - With the promise of $65 million from the state, the University of Massachusetts will move ahead with a long-planned project - a new $85 million academic classroom building that will provide the campus with 1,800 state-of-the-art classroom seats and space for academic programs including communications, journalism and linguistics.

At a campus visit Friday afternoon, Jay Gonzalez, secretary of the commonwealth's Executive Office for Administration and Finance, announced that the state will kick in $65 million for the project through a higher education bond bill.

"This new building has discussed for a number of years and has been among our top priorities," said college spokesman Edward Blaguszewski. "We want to grow the campus, and this building has allowed us to do that and will provide some superb academic space that will serve all of our students."

Gonzalez said the new five-story building, which is expected to be completed by January 2014, will feature classrooms fully equipped with everything from basic chalkboards and audiovisual devices to the most modern educational technologies that did not even exist two years ago. In addition to 45,000 square feet for the communication, journalism, and linguistics programs, other spaces being planned are TV broadcasting and production studios, editing rooms, film screening rooms, computer classrooms, and speech perception and auditory phonetics labs.

The 150,000-square-foot structure will be designed by the Boston architecture firm Burt, Hill. The designers and campus facility planners hope to achieve a LEED Gold rating for the NACB by using advanced energy systems and controls to make this one of the lowest energy-consuming buildings of its type on campus, according to a release.

Buildings that now house the university's journalism, linguistics and communications departments are outdated, and their lack of available learning space played a role in their being selected over other UMass programs, Blaguszewski said,

"The buildings that those people are in now are old and really lacking the infrastructure that these departments need," Blaguszewski said.

The building will be at the north end of the campus pond near the Lincoln Campus Center and Student Union and is expected to create a convenient central hub for student activities. Entrances will welcome passengers from the Pioneer Valley Transportation's bus stop and pedestrians on the main walkway along the pond to the north and heavily traveled walkways on the west near the Campus Center and Student Union.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.