Breaking Ground:
Albright Celebrates the
College’s
Planned
New Science Center
With hard hats on and shovels in hand, President Lex McMillan (fourth from left), campaign co-chairs Sue Perrotty
’75 and Andrew Maier, faculty and students break ground for the new Science Center.
The Albright College Board of Trustees hosted
a ceremonial groundbreaking for the College’s planned new Science Center in October.
This celebratory event was timed to coincide
with the fall meeting of the Albright Board
of Trustees, whose members have provided a
substantial portion of the funds raised for the
facility so far. Construction is expected to begin
in early 2008.
The new Science Center will include construction
of a four-story addition to the existing Merner-Pfeiffer Hall of Science and renovation of the
original historic building, constructed in 1929 and
added to and renovated in 1965.
The complex will include 41,635 square
feet of new state-of-the-art space added to the
37,019 square feet of renovated space, for a total
of 78,654 square feet. The new construction will
wrap the west and north sides of the 1965 addition
to the original Science Hall. Construction
costs are currently estimated at $27 million.
Construction will take approximately 28
months.
Architects for the project are Lord, Aeck and
Sargent of Atlanta. Pre-construction services have
been provided by Wohlsen Construction Company
of Lancaster.
The new building will facilitate Albright’s hallmark
ability to allow students to combine fields
of learning to create an individualized education.
Faculty also work collaboratively crossing disciplines
and sharing instrumentation, and conducting
collaborative research with students.
“Science at Albright has been one of the
College’s pillars of excellence for a century and a
half,” President Lex McMillan said, “and Albright
has produced more than 1,000 physicians,
researchers and teachers in the sciences. Our new
facility will support not only 21st century science,
but the interdisciplinary teaching and learning of
science that is a way of life at Albright. We have
outstanding faculty, and instrumentation that
exceeds many of our peers. Now we will have the
kind of facility that will be commensurate with the
high quality of our faculty, our program, and the
sophisticated equipment which our students use.
“We are grateful for the magnificent support
from our trustees for the Science Center, and the
leadership of Sue Perrotty ’75 and Andy Maier
for making this much needed facility a reality,”
McMillan said. Trustees Perrotty and Maier, both
of Reading, co-chaired Crossing Boundaries: The
Campaign for Albright and the Berks County Capital
Campaign for the Science Center.
Albright offers the following science
programs: biology, biotechnology, chemistry,
biochemistry, physics, optics, psychobiology,
environmental science, environmental chemistry
and environmental studies, and pre-professional
programs in pre-medicine, pre-dentistry and
pre-veterinary medicine. |
