Ceiling tiles come crashing down in the middle of class. The building is ice-cold in the winter and scorching-hot in the summer. There are frequent floods and power outages.
Welcome to OSH.
Nestled east of the Marriott Library on central campus, this classroom and office space is deemed the worst building on campus by many. It’s in a constant state of disrepair that Ruth Watkins, senior vice president for academic affairs, calls “bad stewardship.”
“Every time we have a repair, every time the air conditioning or the heat doesn’t work, we have affected learning and we have affected the function of the campus,” she said. “[We can’t] keep patching, repairing and fixing.”
But all of that is about to change: The 60-year-old building will be demolished and rebuilt into a new complex with study spaces, interactive lecture halls and college departments.
The project is currently in the design stage, where a steering committee of faculty and students will have a year to plan out the architecture and features of the new facility. Crews are set to break ground in fall 2016, with an initial demolition phase to remove hazardous asbestos and lead paint. They will reuse as much of the material as is safe, such as the steel or bricks, to lessen environmental impacts.
Construction is estimated to take two years to complete, Watkins said, with the space potentially open for classes in spring 2019.
Though the exact blueprint is still in the works, there will be a separate space for the Hinckley Institute of Politics, which is currently housed on the second floor of OSH. Kirk Jowers, former director of the Institute, said in April that the space will likely be called the Price International Center because of a donation from U.S. Ambassador John Price. The Institute could be a separate building in the new OSH complex or connected by a wing to the main building.
“It will be really exciting because we’ve grown so much that we’re just really cramped here [in OSH],” Jowers said.
Watkins said the new OSH building has also received “very significant” donations and will be named after the leading donor (to be announced early Fall Semester). Though the facility will no longer be called OSH, Watkins said the university would still like to recognize Orson Spencer, a first chancellor to the college in 1850 when it was still the University of Deseret, with an auditorium or a floor.
Donations and institutional funds will cover slightly more than half of the total $60 million cost, with a student fee making up the rest. The fee, set at $45 per student each semester, starts when the building construction is completed and expires after 10 years. The Utah Legislature is also contributing $1 million per year for operations and maintenance after the facility is built.
Jason Perry, vice president for government relations at the U and the interim director of the Hinckley Institute, worked to secure the new building and funding.
“[OSH] is the most heavily utilized building by all undergraduate students,” he said in an email. “We owe it to our students and faculty to have safe, functional facilities that can be utilized without fear of class being cancelled due to a power outage, flood or lack of proper heating and cooling.”
Perry is excited to break ground on the new space as the “poor condition of the building is no secret.”
According to a 2013 facility assessment study commissioned by the College of Social and Behavioral Science, the current building does not have a seismic resisting system, which means it’s not built to withstand an earthquake by today’s standards. Additionally, several pipes in OSH are broken, the windows are difficult to open and a lack of insulation means there is poor sound control between the classrooms.
Watkins said these concerns, among others, have driven the conversation on remodeling the space for years. Jordan Thomas, a recent U graduate in economics, is glad all of the talk is finally coming to fruition.
“It’s the worst building I’ve ever been in,” he said.
Thomas once had back-to-back math and banking classes in OSH and said his classroom was “unbearably” hot in the middle of winter. He once dropped a pencil during a lecture and said when he picked it up, the floor was warm to the touch. He figures the class was located above the boiler room.
“I was smart and just didn’t wear my coat in that class any more like I did in the rest of my classes,” he said with a laugh.
Watkins said she once saw a group working on a school project in the women’s restroom because it was the only place they could find an outlet. Creating adequate study spaces for these students is chief among her concerns for the new facility.
She also hopes to recruit more students and faculty to the U by having state-of-the-art buildings on campus and updating learning spaces to match modern teaching methods — that’s been the mindset of the university’s leadership for the past decade. Projects such as the new Student Life Center and the Spencer Fox Eccles Business Building, are all a part of an “enormous reinvestment” in campus, Watkins said. She believes OSH may be the most significant part.
“In students’ minds, it’s the worst building on campus,” she said. “[But] OSH is a pretty important building when you consider that virtually everybody spends some time there … you might think of it as the heart or hub of campus.”
@CourtneyLTanner