Facilities
The most recent new threads in the "Tapestry of Learning" were introduced in 2008 with the completion of our spectacular new Science Center: the gleaming new construction of Harned Hall joins seamlessly together with a fully renovated Thompson Hall. Framing a new central courtyard, the science center represents one of the most impressive and imaginative scientific laboratory and instruction spaces on any college campus. If you've seen it, you know it's misleading to call it merely a "science building." It is much more than that. Throughout its 176,000 square feet, the science center itself teaches scientific principles in virtually every square foot of its design through a series of faculty-created "science on display" elements. Of course, the facility also includes fully-equipped labs, electron microscopes, a DNA sequencer, a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, the natural history museum's expansive collection of plant and animal species, and some of the most talented science faculty in the country. It's an extraordinary place for our students and faculty to do original research, and an ambitious $66-million investment in the physicians, inventors, environmental scientists, and researchers of the future.
The "Tapestry of Learning" was designed to sustain and expand upon what is sacred and inspiring in our campus-our collegiate Tudor-Gothic architecture, our intimate scale, our use of natural materials, our uniquely Northwest lush landscape and towering fir trees, and, most of all, our commitment to academic excellence. With the completion of the new science center, we continue our ongoing work to complete the tapestry.
Over the next eight years, our plan calls for us to transform the campus in ways it hasn't seen since the dramatic transformations of the 1950s and 60s. First, we will unify from north to south the now 100 acres that comprise the campus-from Collins Library to Memorial Fieldhouse-with an integrated landscape element we call "Commencement Walk." Named for the procession seniors take every graduation day when they march from Jones Hall to Baker Stadium, it will wind its way along Todd Field and then open up into a new green space that runs all the way to the Fieldhouse. It will be bordered on the east by an impressive new academic building of red brick and limestone, built to LEED silver standards: the Center for Health Sciences.
The Center for Health Sciences is the centerpiece of the plan's first phase, and the primary thread in this part of the tapestry. No liberal arts college campus in the country will have anything like it. It will combine-for the first time-our undergraduate teaching and research programs in psychology and exercise science with our clinical graduate programs in physical therapy and occupational therapy. This unique combination of elements-graduate and undergraduate teaching, psychological and physiological research, pediatric and adult clinics where students learn and patients are treated-will be unified in the curriculum through a new neuroscience program.
For more information, please contact the Capital Giving Staff.
