Building Exterior

View at Randall and Campus Drive

Southwest Plaza

Dayton and Orchard Streets

Orchard Street and Campus Drive (beginning of W. Johnson)

It’s tearin’ me apart…

Excuse the Backstreet Boys reference. This past week I scrambled to put together a design structure proposal for yesterday’s Union Council meeting. Over the past month, I consulted surveys taken of the New South Campus Union design process and also met with many folks who were instrumental in the process. Factoring in all the criticisms and highlights, I came up with a framework that I thought alleviated many of the past problems. Preemptively, though, I recognized the challenges that my proposal created. It’s a good thing we have many critical eyes on Union Council who put my proposal through the ringer. For context, here is the diagram that I presented:

I’ll save you the explanation of this diagram and cut to the chase. The proposal was deemed a bit unwieldy and subsequently torn apart.

We didn’t come to any hard and fast resolution, yet. But that’s okay. These things happen.  A group of us will be getting together over the next month and a half to hash out the details and come up with something better to approve at the January Union Council meeting. The goal is to have the Design Committee in place before architects come on board for the Memorial Union Renovation, starting early next semester.

The big win for the project was the approval of the furniture (finally). Rest assured, we will now have furniture in the building (whew), not that it would ever be otherwise.

Ramblin’ man

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of heading up to Minneapolis with members of the Advance Team to check out the Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. We met with staff from Coffman to talk about planning for the opening of a new building. The staff shared their experiences from moving back into Coffman when they renovated it in 2003.

While I was at Coffman, I had a chance to sit in on the weekly meeting of U of M’s student programming board. I learned that the Wisconsin Union as an organization is a lot more complex than most other student unions. Another thing I realized is that it is hard to not have a bias against other unions when you have invested so much time into the success of your own.

This brings me to the next part of our trip, the UW-River Falls University Center. We visited River Falls on our way back from Minneapolis to benchmark sustainability features at their union. It was also nice to see the River Falls University Center in the flesh because it was built by Workshop Architects, who are building the New South Campus Union. I was better able to visualize what our new union is going to look like. It gave me some piece of mind to see how well their union turned out, which makes me even more excited for ours.

These will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about:

It wasn’t all work, no play, though. Between union visits we were able to take some time out and enjoy ourselves:

Here are some shots of the whole team: