The Metcalf complex - including the Metcalf Chemistry, Metcalf Research and Medical Research labs - will serve as a temporary home for several programs and departments, allowing for large-scale construction and renovation projects elsewhere on campus.
Considerable space opened up in the complex last fall when the Department of Neuroscience relocated to the Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences.
"It's really the only space on campus right now that we have flexibility with," said Associate Provost Pamela O'Neil, who staffs the provost's Space Committee, which monitors how space in campus buildings is allocated.
According to O'Neil, the vacant areas will be used as "interim space" for a number of departments. "In the next few years, we are going to be using it to solve some temporary problems," she said.
"When we take a building and move it or gut it to renovate it, we need some place to put the people that are currently occupying it," O'Neil said. "It doesn't sound very glamorous, but we can't do the major building projects that we're doing unless we have that space to move people into."
The Department of History will occupy office space in the complex for six months, O'Neil said. Some members of the history department will be displaced from their offices in Peter Green House when that building gets picked up and moved to a nearby location to make way for the Walk, the pedestrian pathway that will link Lincoln Field to the Pembroke campus.
An anthropology lab was also recently installed in Metcalf, but O'Neil said she hopes the lab will eventually move to Rhode Island Hall, which will be renovated to house the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.
Metcalf will also house the ADVANCE program, which will move into office and conference space on the second floor of the building within the next week, O'Neil said. Funded by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the program, which is directed by O'Neil, aims to facilitate the advancement of women faculty in science and engineering.
O'Neil said "a subset" of the Department of Mathematics will also be housed in Metcalf. The details of the department's presence in Metcalf are not yet clear, but O'Neil said more mathematics professors may move into Metcalf over time in "increments that make sense."
The relocation of the neuroscience department also cleared space in the Medical Research Lab, which connects Metcalf to Arnold Lab. "We would like the MRL to be assigned to nanoscientists," O'Neil said, adding that a few are already moving into the lab. Administrators hope to use the space for professors who are from different departments but are doing interdisciplinary research relating to nanoscience and have overlapping research interests, she said.
O'Neil said the Space Committee has yet to determine long-term plans for the Metcalf complex. "It might be that we look at this space for interdisciplinary science, as we have for nano, or it might be that it's more appropriate to move a department into this building," she said. "What we don't want to do is keep filling it up with odd people who just need space."
O'Neil and Michael McCormick, director of planning for Facilities Management, who also staffs the Space Committee, meet weekly to discuss space needs across campus. "We filter all of the space requests ... and we are thinking strategically about what the needs are campus wide," O'Neil said.
Metcalf currently houses the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. William Warren, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences and chair of the department, said the changes in the complex will not have a huge impact on his department. "The space that we've used hasn't changed at all," he said.
According to Warren, the cognitive and linguistic sciences department has requested more space to accommodate additional faculty. "I hope sometime this spring that will get figured out," he said.
The Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences will eventually move into a new building at 154 Angell St., which O'Neil said is currently slated to open in 2010. For now, Warren said, "We'll make some new friends."
