Construction for the new Carmichael Gym facility began in May with plans for the building to include new amenities, education opportunities and a centralized hub for student life on campus.
According to Eric Hawkes, the executive director for Wellness and Recreation, NC State has been planning the new building for several years, with the help of student leaders, campus partners and surveys.
“This has been two years in the making, from when we initially started talking about the project,” Hawkes said. “So, the building that is no longer here really had some significant issues. There were $7+ million of deferred maintenance, it really had outlived its life expectancy.”
Hawkes also said that the old building had many problems, such as accessibility issues, unused spaces, navigation issues and more, that would have taken millions of dollars to fix.
“The building itself didn’t meet accessibility codes,” Hawkes said. “There are students on this campus that could not get to spaces within the Student Wellness and Recreation Center, which wasn’t okay. We were kind of at a crossroads of what do we do. We had to do something.”
Hawkes said that the new complex will include new exercise spaces, offices, fitness studios and other amenities.
“It’s going to be 20,000 square feet of new fitness center space,” Hawkes said. “It’s going to have a teaching kitchen… It’s going to replace the existing performance studios and classrooms and office spaces that were in there. It’s going to have a climbing center, so we’re going to have a new climbing wall and bouldering wall.”
According to Jason Spivey, associate director for Wellness and Recreation, entrances to Carmichael Gym will be condensed and all buildings will be connected. The next step in the construction process will be begin later in the year.
“The next time that we will really start to see a big impact is late this year,” Spivey said. “We’ll start to see steel and things like that being constructed, really the skeleton of the building… Ultimately the building is scheduled to open fall of 2020, so it’s about a two-year window for construction, total.”
Heather Gately, coordinator for member services, said that the facilities within Carmichael will all be fully functional during the renovation and she does not expect to see the number of members decrease during construction.
“Anything that we lost from that building has pretty much just been moved to another place that is still operational,” Gately said. “We’re still fully functional and we have not seen a decrease in visits or membership enrollment, it’s actually been the opposite. We had our largest number of enrollments for the month of May so far, and that’s after things had already started to change here. We’re really not expecting, operationally or programmatically, any real impact that would diminish what we already offer.”
According to Spivey, the current construction schedule will be contingent upon weather. However, Wellness and Recreation will be providing construction updates throughout the construction process through their website.
“There will inevitably be changes and disruptions to the facility or to the programs or to the services at some point,” Spivey said. “We work hard to keep our website up to date and send out information as quickly as we can when we know there’s going to be changes.”
Gately also mentioned that the renovation will help to create a centralized space on campus for student health and wellbeing.
“One thing that’s nice is that we are really being intentional about how this building will look and feel in relation to Talley,” Gately said. “It really allows us to make this intersection and this part of campus a hub for student life and people can move seamlessly between the two… it really just helps create that centralized hub for student life and student health and well-being and really helps us navigate those partnerships that we have with people that are housed in Talley as well.”
More information about the renovation as well as a livestream displaying the construction site can be found on the Wellness and Recreation website.
