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On May 14, the University of Scranton broke ground on the Unified Science Center, the largest capital project in the school’s 121-year history. The four-story center will occupy 150,000 square feet of new construction on what is now a parking lot, which will be integrated with 50,000 square feet of renovated space in the Harper McGinnis Wing of St. Thomas Hall.
Together, the 200,000-square-foot science center will house 22 class and seminar rooms, 34 laboratories, 80 offices, a rooftop green house for research, a 180-seat lecture hall for symposia and seminars, an atrium, a vivarium, faculty/student research and meeting areas and a faculty meeting room modeled after the tea room at Oxford University. The approximately $70 million center will be certified LEED Silver and be home to the university’s Biology, Chemistry, Computing Sciences, Physics/Electrical Engineering and Mathematics departments.
Keystone Edge: Tell me a bit about how this project was conceived and what it means for the school.
Rev. Scott Pilarz, S.J.: This really is the culmination of almost a decade worth of planning, first and foremost on the part of our science faculty, who got excited in 1999 about Project Kaleidoscope, which is a national effort to re-imagine how science and math can and ought to be taught so that more students would be attracted to those fields. As you know, it’s also a national crisis that so few students are pursuing degrees in science and math. So our faculty got increasingly involved in Project Kaleidoscope, especially as we hired younger faculty, who came in with a very different and cutting-edge vision of how science should be taught, and this project really got a head of steam.
We started probably six or seven years ago to do the long-range financial planning that would enable us to do this project at this time, as it is a considerably expensive project for us. At the same time, we just opened a brand new campus center January a year ago and a new 300-bed residence hall for sophomores last summer. So it’s been a busy time in terms of capital projects on campus, but this is by far the biggest and in many ways the most exciting.
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KE: What is the central idea behind the design and function of the new science center, and what role will it play in the life of the university?
SP: A lot of the idea around the floor plan of the building has to do with promoting inter-disciplinary work or cross-disciplinary work–to break down the old silos of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and math. So the building is designed deliberately to promote interaction across departments. It is also designed, very explicitly, to promote research for faculty and students, so the research lab space in the building is considerable. And that’s been a hallmark of our science departments here; the faculty has been great about bringing students into their labs–over the summer, over Christmas vacation–co-authoring articles with them, and it’s really been a great thing and it will only get better as a result of this building.
KE: When you talk about "breaking down old silos," what aspects of the building’s design incorporate the idea of cross-disciplinary work?
SP: Try to imagine three–what the architects are calling–"communities" in the building. So it’s not one big monolithic structure, but it’s broken up into what they’re calling communities, and those communities will be populated according to interest rather than discipline. So you might not have all the biologists in one place, you could have some biologists who work on certain issues in a particular part of the building, but next to chemists who do similar or related research. So it’s not built as a traditional science building might have been with biology on one floor, chemistry on another, physics on another. There’s more flex space, and that’s especially true of laboratories. Even if some offices are grouped by discipline, labs will be shared and equipment will be shared by research agenda.
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The other interesting feature of the building is that there is space for informal conversation. In our older science building, which will go away once the new building is done, there was no place for students and faculty to meet, really. There, we’d have to stand outside a classroom in the hallway, annoying the people who are trying to teach in another classroom behind them. So this building deliberately has space in it to promote what the architects call "intellectual collisions." I kept asking if we could come up with better language than that, but that’s what they said, they want these intellectual collisions to happen in spaces throughout the building.
KE: You mentioned earlier the current national crisis in science and math education. How does the science center fit in with the University of Scranton’s future in the context of this crisis?
SP: One factor that also encouraged us to build this building is that it’s not only for science majors. Every student who graduates from the university must take at least two science classes. And part of the thinking is that if we get students in this brand new building with all these facilities that will really excite them, we might attract more students that will actually major in the sciences, building on the course they take early on in their career here.
[…] Our Associate Provost Joe Dreisbach, who is himself a chemist, is really articulate about how this building will be transparent, interactive and exciting, and dispel some of what he thinks are the myths about science education. He worries that a lot of students think of scientists working alone in a laboratory and putting in long hours by themselves, and he wants to argue it’s just the opposite is increasingly the case, that science is team-based and interactive and exciting. So the building is designed to promote that.
John Davidson is the managing editor of Keystone Edge. Send feedback here.
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