In the midst of a campus-wide reckoning over how the current economic misery will shape Brown's future, the Office of the Dean of the College announced last week that it is moving forward with plans to build a science resource center on the third floor of the Sciences Library.
The center, slated to open about a year from now, is intended to bring together science students from different departments and to help build an interdisciplinary science community with dedicated study space and resources targeted at science students.
Since the beginning of the semester, I have attended two undergraduate focus groups that debated the design and mission of the science resource center. We analyzed the project's goals and discussed how the center's design could best serve the University's science community. These meetings provided a detailed view of not only the goals and constraints facing the architects but also the project's motivations and potential.
I predict that the science center will quickly become a campus resource nearly as valuable to the student community as the Friedman Study Center. As it stands, however, I believe that the physical plan is too modest to meet all of the needs the Dean of the College has outlined. The solution to this problem is not to reduce the scope of the center, but to increase its proposed size from one floor to two or three in order to satisfy all of the constituencies involved.
Currently, the design team is soliciting input from both students and faculty, groups that have starkly different demands for academic space. The proposal aims to squeeze in space for students to study, for professors and TAs to hold out-of-class meetings, for campus groups to host occasional seminars and for students and researchers to conduct community outreach projects.
And all of this is supposed to fit on the third floor. To give some perspective to those readers who have never been above the Mezzanine, the SciLi's upper levels have only one quarter as much floor space as the Friedman Center. Obviously, this project's collection of deserving stakeholders and its list of laudable goals will not fit on the third floor alone.
The Friedman Center should be used as a design model here. As soon as it opened, the Friedman was recognized as one of the premier study spaces on campus. Indeed, it may have gotten so busy that it has become a victim of its own success. And there is a simple reason why it has worked so well: The Friedman Center was designed solely to accommodate the students who study there every day. Aside from the paucity of outlets in some areas, the Fried's design intelligently anticipates the ways that students currently study. Indeed, a properly designed science center would take some strain off the Fried and make it a more usable space again.
The Friedman Center's success should also serve as the strongest indication on Brown's campus of how the University's libraries will function in the future. It has been clear for more than a decade that libraries will have to physically transform from book warehouses to serve the needs of laptop-toting, twenty-first century students. Facing this reality, the Brown Library must keep thinking about how it can repurpose space that is currently wasted housing underused print materials.
Of the six on-campus libraries, the SciLi is clearly the most retrograde. Its premier location makes its physical misuse all the more disappointing. With the nearly complete online migration of scientific journals, it hardly seems necessary to keep decades worth of journal archives in the SciLi. I doubt moving the 42 volumes of the Oil and Gas Journal from Thayer Street to the Library Collection Annex in Cranston would seriously inconvenience any Brown researchers, especially considering that the Library's LexisNexis subscription includes instant access to the journal back to 1978.
As a physics concentrator, the WiFi and the dry erase boards (and walls) in the Friedman Center have been far more useful to me than the 11 floors of books above it. To facilitate this inevitable conversion, the Library, as an institution, should be a full partner in any redesign efforts.
In an economic environment that will prevent the University from undertaking large-scale capital projects for the foreseeable future, it is important that the administration reconsider the current uses of all existing campus resources. The recent renovation of J. Walter Wilson is a great example of how modernization can reclaim the relevance of underutilized campus spaces for a fraction of the price of a new building.
Right now, it is clear that the administration considers the science center to be a one-floor project. However, for the center to be as successful as possible the current design process should envision that floor as part of a larger complex. The center would be better able to meet its goals if the demands on each floor were pared down with a larger project in mind.
During the focus group meeting, the architects, whose most recent on-campus project was the bookstore renovation, seemed keenly aware of the elements that make for effective study spaces. The students who came to the focus groups unanimously felt that the most effective help the science center could provide would be to facilitate the formation of ongoing study groups.
Because science students are not the most gregarious on campus, the architecture itself must do a lot of the social engineering. The center should be designed to bring students together in spaces that will be both accessible to newcomers and private enough for students to concentrate. Science students should also be able to reserve the study rooms and see real-time availability online so that more time is spent studying instead of searching for a place to sit.
Group study rooms, dry erase boards, fully loaded scientific computing stations, printer kiosks and electric outlets are the components of an ideal resource center for students. As the science resource center project team designs the third floor renovation it should focus on meeting the needs of students, not faculty or outreach programs. If the center is popular with its intended audience, the University can expand the science resource center and move in the remaining programs on higher floors.
Nick Werle '10 is a physics and modern critical philosophy concentrator from New York.
