Housing space
at Appalachian State University may increase if administrators
decide to build two new residence hall projects they are
investigating.
The two projects would be located near Raley Hall and the
Broyhill Inn & Conference Center.
“We’re doing a feasibility study to determine
the aspects of adding a learning center and residence facility
to Raley Hall,” Clyde D. Robbins, director of design
and construction, said Friday. “We’re just at
the point of interviewing architects to find out if it’s
feasible to plug this into Raley Hall and what’s the
cost of it.”
“The other project would be near the Broyhill Inn.
We’re doing a study to see if it will accommodate small
group housing,” Vice Chancellor for student development
Gregory S. Blimling said Friday. “The majority of that
space would be for houses accommodating around 50 students
each in apartments, and we hope to dedicate the houses to
specialties like language, chemistry or criminal justice.”
Housing and Residence Life was unavailable for comment about
these projects.
Blimling said that the new Raley Hall facility would be a
second Living-Learning Center physically tied to Raley Hall
and mainly intended for business majors. It would house 200-300
students.
“We want to include business majors and international
students there, and make it a real international business
community,” Blimling said. “We’re also
looking to include classrooms, faculty offices and even some
apartments for faculty to live on campus.”
Blimling said he had earlier gone to visit the Charles F.
Knight center at Washington University in St. Louis to get
ideas for the project.
According to its Web site, the Charles F. Knight center is
based around education courses for business executives.
“We would hope to use our center in the summer for
executive education,” Blimling said. “We’d
bring in resident CEOs for a period who would live there
and interact with the students so they could develop contacts
and learn how corporations work.
“We hope to fund this by raising half the cost in private
donations and the other half the same way we do most residence
halls, by taking out the money on bond and paying it back.”
The Broyhill Inn project, like the one connected to Raley
Hall, would be built as a learning community setting, something
Blimling said the university is trying to do more of.
“Our goal is to eventually house about 50 percent of
students on campus,” Blimling said. “We’re
looking at creating a seamless learning environment between
class and life.”
“We bought 15 acres near Broyhill Inn from the [Mormon
church], it’s a difficult site, and we’re trying
to assemble a team of architects, planners and engineers
and see how feasible it is to develop low-density housing,
almost like a village,” Robbins said. “We’re
still deciding rather to approach this publicly through the
university or with a private developer, like we did with
University Highlands [apartments].”
Robbins said that private housing could be built quickly
due to lower standards than for public buildings, which are
built to last longer. He expects the project to house 300-500
students.
“Also, we hope to use some of the space as transitional
housing for faculty members,” Blimling said. “One
of the real problems that Appalachian has in recruiting faculty
is that the cost of property is so high in Boone that it
discourages some highly qualified individuals from joining
the faculty here.”
“This has been in the works for sometime. We’re
trying to look ahead to future enrollment,” Robbins
said.
“We’re not committed to building either of these
projects yet, we’re just studying the costs and our
options.”
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