UW-Madison faculty voiced its concern over the university's Campus Master Plan at a meeting of the Faculty Senate Monday at Bascom Hall.
Alan Fish, UW-Madison associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and management, presented the broad plan for changes to campus. But faculty members were more interested in specific buildings where they teach and work. While they also asked what the university is doing to combat poor ventilation and the lack of sufficient elevators in buildings not slated for destruction, much of the discussion centered on the Humanities Building.
\The Humanities building widely has the reputation as being the worst building on campus,"" said UW-Madison history professor Jim Donnelly, speaking on behalf of the history department. ""We wonder why we are the last of the last [in the reconstruction plans]?""
Chancellor John Wiley responded by saying all the demolition and reconstruction plans are highly tentative.
""All of the building plans are very dependent on two factors that we have relatively little control over,"" Wiley said. ""One is procurement of outside, non-state, gift funds, and the other is the timing that is determined by the programs rather than anything else.""
Wiley explained new facilities will have to be constructed for the art and music departments to move into before Humanities is demolished so the programs have somewhere to go. Then Humanities will come down in two phases, and the history department will be temporarily relocated.
Some in attendance wanted to know why Vilas Hall, which was designed by the same architectural firm as Humanities-Wiley revealed the firm was actually called ""The Brutalist School of Architecture""-was not slated for demolition.
""We look at the structure of the buildings ... and how long their future life [expectancy is] as well as their energy consumption,"" Fish said, ""Vilas wasn't as bad in those areas as some of the other buildings we targeted for removal. We are in the process of looking at 18 to 20 buildings on campus. ... Adding more to that we felt would be unrealistic.\
