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Plans are moving forward for construction of the Humanities Pavilion Restaurant beside Gambrell Hall and the Humanities buildings on the east side of the Columbia campus.
University trustees at their Oct. 27 meeting OK’d an expansion of the 1.75 million project to include a mezzanine level for additional student lounge space. The dining facility will replace the picnic tables on the Humanities patio area. Besides a student dining facility in Capstone, there are no other sit-down eateries on the east side of campus. The Humanities Pavilion Restaurant is scheduled for completion by August 2006.
Trustees also saw plans for a photovoltaic walkway system that will improve lighting on the ramp between Bates House and the Blatt P.E. Center. Funding for the lights, powered by solar energy stored in batteries, comes from a $250,000 Santee Cooper grant.
The board also approved a plan to co-locate the University’s dance program in the future Band Hall off of Sumter Street behind the engineering machine shop. The dance program will have nearly 11,000 gross square feet of rehearsal and office space on the facility’s second floor. The additional space will add $1.7 million to the project, for a total preliminary cost of $6.7 million. The current Band Hall is located on what will soon become the Horizon Center, part of USC’s research campus initiative known as Innovista.
In a related project, the USC Strings Project, which uses the current Band Hall, will be moved to the ground floor of a parking garage to be built on Park Street near the Koger Center as part of Innovista. Campus planners are considering adding a crosswalk from that parking garage to the Koger Center. The 10,000 gross square feet of space for the Strings Project will add about $600,000 to the cost of the garage.
Trustees also approved USC’s Aiken’s acquisition of Pacer Commons, a 316-bed student apartment complex located near the campus. Also approved was a $1.1 million upgrade to Pacer Downs, USC Aiken’s current student housing complex.
In other business, trustee’s OK’d $600,000 to establish a need-based scholarship program in the School of Law.
In his report, President Sorensen announced that the number of applications for fall 2006 was higher than for the same time last year, which itself was a record-setting year for freshman applications.
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