With the completion of the loading dock at the McGlothlin Campus Center, campus construction has reached its conclusion.
The dock’s renovation was to improve the view from the front door of the new Royce and Pam Money Student Recreation and Wellness Center.
The bulk of the plan was adding plants and flowers to the area, which was difficult considering we are in the middle of a drought and winter is also right around the corner.
Zane Dennis, Executive Director of Facilities and Campus Development, said that since the project was started in the middle of the summer it was hard to plant everything they wanted but the landscape project will be full force in the spring.
Other than improving landscape around campus, there are are no future plans of construction on campus.
“It’s kind of a boring time right now,” Dennis said. “We are looking at a lot of things, tossing around three or four ideas of potential projects.”
Dennis mentioned remodeling a bathroom in the Onstead-Packer Biblical Studies building since the landscape project has slowed down.
Dennis said that the high amount of campus growth in the past three or four years “wasn’t planeed it just kind of happened that way, everything just fell into place.”
Many of the challenges Dennis faced in his work arose out of the difficulty of preserving that age while expanding and improving campus facilities, he said. When some of the campus buildings that dated back to 1929 needed renovations, Dennis and his team had to find a way to merge the old constructions with new additions. The team visited the campuses of the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame to see how those universities built in and around their historic campuses.Dennis talked about how he thought ACU’s campus compare to other schools in the state and also around the country.
“I think our campus is like a lot of other universities. It has age to it.”