Construction in full bloom
New buildings to grace Auburn campus next spring

By Nancy Mann Jackson

When Auburn University students finish the school year next spring, their campus will look much different than it did in August. Auburn's signature azaleas will be in full bloom and the campus will have several new state-of-the-art buildings.

The College of Sciences and Mathematics will inhabit a massive new $30 million Science Laboratory Center and Auditorium and the School of Forestry and Wildlife will have moved into its new $16 million four-building campus.

Both of the major construction projects are well under way, with workers and suppliers maneuvering on the busy campus more than 30,000 students.

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Science Laboratory Center. Site clearing for the new three-building science laboratory center began in March 2003 with foundation work beginning the following July. While two of the three buildings were completed in mid-September, the center will not be occupied until January after the university's winter break.

The Robins and Morton Group of Birmingham is the construction manager for the project.

The first of the three buildings is a 32,000-sq.-ft. classroom and office building that will contain six high-tech classrooms and a 100-seat lecture hall on the first floor and administrative offices on the second floor. The building and the second, a 300-seat, 4,200-sq.-ft. auditorium, were completed in August.

The third building, which will span five stories and 100,000 sq. ft., will be completed in January. The main focus of the building is its 26 different teaching laboratories, along with their supporting storage rooms and other amenities, which will house undergraduate labs for chemistry and biology.

The complex begins a major project that will eventually result in a College of Sciences and Mathematics academic park, which will feature considerable green space with the college's buildings oriented around the park in a quadrangle fashion.

"This project will really help to centralize the College of Sciences and Mathematics, creating a precinct area for the college," said Laura McDonald, Auburn's design project manager. "It's a project that has been in the works a long time. Most of the older teaching laboratories are out of date, and because codes and guidelines change many 30-year-old buildings may not meet current standards.

"The new labs are state-of-the-art, designed with all the latest technologies."

While the updated design has remained unchanged throughout construction, there have been some obstacles.

"The biggest issue in constructing this job is that it's right in the dead center of campus," said Jimmy Griffis, project manager on the job for Robins and Morton. "There's nowhere here for our employees and contractors to park their cars and there's very little room to store materials."

Workers have parked in an available lot about a half-mile away, and some contractors have provided vans to shuttle their workers to and from the parking lot. The project also has located its material storage area about a mile away from the job, which sometimes makes it difficult to get the right materials on the job at the right time.

In some cases, contractors have arranged for major material drop-offs to take place at the jobsite.

The science laboratory job is also the first project for which Auburn has used a construction manager.

"There's been a bit of a learning curve for both of us," Griffis said. "We've had to learn what they expect and how they like to get jobs done. But we're very proactive on safety and cleanup, so I think they've been pleased."

Robins and Morton oversaw five contractors during the site work phase and 15 contractors for the remainder of the project.

School of Forestry and Wildlife. The new School of Forestry and Wildlife is being built into an existing forest, which will provide an outdoor classroom for students and faculty.

But constructing four new buildings within a heavily forested area hasn't been easy.

"It makes for a very tight site," said Patricia Lindsey, project manager with Brasfield & Gorrie LLC of Birmingham, which is handling construction management. The job, which began in September 2003, is slated to wrap up in April.

Each of the four buildings that will make up the school has its own specialized function. The north building will be a classroom building with two 60-seat classrooms, two 30-seat classrooms, a teaching laboratory, one 100-seat classroom, a 45-seat computer laboratory, project rooms and offices for faculty and student services.

The central building will be a research laboratory building that also contains faculty offices and the dean's suite. The south building will contain building services, "dirty areas" such as sample preparation rooms, project rooms and graduate student offices.

The fourth building will serve as an assembly building for large gatherings.

The interior of the buildings will also have the feel of the outdoors. The main connector between the north and central buildings will be a glassed-in showcase of forestry products featuring heavy timber construction.

Lindsey said working on one of Auburn's first construction management jobs has been both the greatest challenge and the greatest satisfaction of the project.

"Auburn University has only been doing construction management recently, so we're going through the learning curve with them," she said. "We've worked with the architect from the beginning. We've put together the bid packages, done all the pre-qualifying of contractors and made recommendations to the university, and now we manage and administer all the contracts.

"I think it's really allowed for better quality control on this project, because instead of Auburn pre-qualifying one contractor, we've qualified lots of contractors for particular jobs."

Useful Source:

For a live shot of the Sciences Laboratory Center, go to: http://www.auburn.edu/academic/science_math/slc/hig_res_cam.html