May 1, 2000
May 8 dedication of Mary Gates Hall marks new era
The dedication ceremonies for Mary Gates Hall will take place at 1 p.m. May 8. Gov. Gary Locke and members of the Gates family will be present.
The dedication of Mary Gates Hall May 8 will commemorate the creation of a unique facility at the University of Washington focusing on undergraduate learning. But more than that, it is a physical manifestation of the University’s continuing commitment to undergraduate teaching and learning.
“The renovation and transformation of the old Physics Building into Mary Gates Hall shows that the University is just as deeply committed to excellence in undergraduate education as it is to being a leading research institution,” says Fred Campbell, dean of undergraduate education and vice provost.
The building will provide the latest in classroom technology, the largest open computer lab on campus, and an array of academic services for undergraduates.
“This building reflects the vision and values of Mary Gates, who served as a Regent from 1975 to 1993,” Campbell says. “She worked to ensure that students were intellectually engaged at the highest level, and that they were committed to community service. The Mary Gates Endowment, which is the University’s largest at $20 million, supports the very best kind of education, in which students work with faculty on research and also with leading service organizations in our community.”
The UW’s renewed commitment to undergraduate education often has led to a search for new ways to create communities, a key to the quality of the undergraduate experience. In its architecture, Mary Gates Hall will attempt to expand those opportunities, especially in the creation of the Commons, a crossroads and meeting area for those who inhabit and visit the building. “The building has been designed to be a place for students and to create synergies between services that formerly were physically dispersed across campus,” Campbell says. In anticipation of the move, members of these units already have begun integrating services to better support students.
“The building is designed to respond to the way students think about their lives,” Campbell says. The Gateway Center, Center for Career Services, and a 180-station UWired drop-in computing lab frame the Commons. The Gateway Center clusters services designed to help students make a successful transition to university life and fully immerse themselves in its vast learning opportunities. In the Gateway Center students can find academic advising, orientation programs for new students, freshmen and transfer student learning communities, opportunities to do research with faculty, internships, service learning courses, and scholarships. The Center for Career Services helps students extend these experiences into professional planning. “The way offices are arranged will make related services visible to students,” says Campbell. “They will be able to see the connections between academic planning and their life goals.”
The building also mixes classrooms with program areas. Mary Gates Hall will be home for the Honors Program, the Program on the Environment, the Center for Quantitative Science, the Program on Africa, the Teaching Academy, the School of Library and Information Science, the Office of Educational Partnerships and Computing & Communications.
Technology is a major area of emphasis in the new building. As one of the first schools in the country to have created a project like UWired, the university took this opportunity to consider how the facilities in a single building could enable professors to integrate technology into learning.
In computer-integrated classrooms, the computers are networked in a way that facilitates peer-oriented writing instruction, extending work done on a similar facility in Denny Hall. A number of sophisticated classrooms are equipped and wired for the latest technology. In classroom laboratories, instructors and students will be able to carry out experiments in teaching, learning and technology.
Students have played an important role in contributing to the building’s computer resources. Computers for the large UWired drop-in computing commons were provided with funds from the student-initiated student technology fee.
This is the third construction phase for the building that began its life as Physics Hall in 1926 and underwent remodeling in 1948. This phase has added two wings and changed the orientation of the building, with a front entry that now faces north toward Suzzallo Library.
The Washington, D.C. firm of Hartman-Cox did the architectural design. The construction architect was Seattle-based Bassetti, and the contractor was Hensel-Phelps. Construction management was provided by Lease Crutcher Lewis.
“Mary Gates Hall represents a unique partnership between the state, which has funded the structure, private donors, who have created the Mary Gates Endowment, and students, who support the technology,” says Campbell.
The dedication ceremonies for Mary Gates Hall will take place beginning at 1 p.m. May 8. Gov. Gary Locke and members of the Gates family will be present for the ceremony, and the emphasis for the day’s events will be on students–with student-created art and student-led demonstrations of research projects throughout the building. The dedication is part of a week of festivities celebrating undergraduate learning at the University that includes the Spring Celebration of the Edward E. Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center at 4:30 p.m. May 10 in the Mary Gates Commons, and the third annual Undergraduate Research Symposium from noon to 6 p.m. May 12 in Mary Gates Hall and the HUB.
