After almost two years of controversy, the renovation plans for Talley are being finalized.
The design team in charge of renovating Talley has presented the project before the Campus Design Review Panel and had the plan approved, meaning it is almost ready to be made public for student examination. However, the designs are not final, and the design team wants to hear student input as they continue developing plans.
According to Lisa Johnson, the N.C. State associate university architect of the project, and Sumayya Jones-Humienny, the project manager, the building is for students.
Johnson said in student interviews the general sentiment towards the current Talley Student Center was “There’s nothing there for me, why would I go there?”
Plans to make Talley more appealing to students include a wide variety of dining options that span multiple floors, a large sloped green space that will provide a view of a movie screen and a late-night hangout called the Beacon. By day, the Beacon will be a dining area and by night it could possibly turn into a dance floor, a karaoke bar or a concert venue for bands.
Jones-Humienny and Johnson said updates, including plan details and design graphics, would be posted on the Talley renovation website.
The renovation plans also aim to make traveling to and through Talley much easier. Not only are building accesses more plentiful, but a pedestrian bridge that crosses the train tracks to the fourth floor of Talley is planned as well.
“The building is intended to transform the whole campus, essentially,” Turan Duda, the lead design principal of the project and design partner of Duda/Paine Architects, said.
Duda is an N.C. State alumnus who was working on his bachelor’s degree in environmental design in architecture when Talley was constructed over a Reynolds Coliseum parking lot in 1972.
As a student, Duda said he recalls struggling to carry his bicycle through the tunnels and wondering why traveling around Talley had to be so difficult. Now he is in charge of designing the new student center, coming full circle to keep up with the campus’ modern needs.
The new building is planned to have twice as much floor space, twice as many offices and a bigger ballroom for school events. According to Duda, when the building was first constructed, the campus only had 14,000 students, but now the building must be able to service more than 34,000.
However, the renovations have not gone as smoothly as hoped.
The Talley redesign was a subject of controversy in 2009, facing opposition from students. They were vocal about their dismay, feeling disenfranchised because of a mandatory fee added to their tuition to cover the cost of the renovation.
Upset at the $83 hike in student fees, students organized on Facebook and protested at public events. Amanda Jones Hoyle of the Triangle Business Journal reported that although more than 60 percent of students voted against the Talley renovations, the final call by administrators was to go ahead with the project.
Marycobb Randall, president of the University Student Center Board of Directors and a senior in business administration, said she believes the controversy came about because students did not know what to expect from a new Talley, and the proposal came about at an inconvenient financial time.
“When the vote was going on we were in the middle of an even worse economic downturn,” Randall said. “But through the past year students have learned stuff about the project, and they learn how much they can enjoy it. So they have more faith in the project.”
Duda said he remembers a Student Government meeting in which a student complained about the fee increase and another student stood up and said, “We need to think of legacy.”
To this end, Duda said he wishes to create a building that is not only functional, but symbolic as well.
“Why doesn’t the student center have an iconic quality?” Duda said, comparing Talley’s impact to the Bell Tower’s iconography. “How do we make this building belong to N.C. State and not at any other place?”
Talley’s new look is designed to transform the center into a visible symbol by adding some landmark features, Duda said. The building will be split into two wings bridged by an atrium. The west wing will contain Stewart Theatre and a “green roof” sectioned building that will replace the old bookstore, while the east wing will feature a technology tower to which the pedestrian bridge connects and the new two-story book store.
But construction work won’t happen anytime soon. According to the Talley renovation website many of the tenants of Talley, including the bookstore, will be moved to Harrelson Hall this year. The actual construction work is set to begin late 2013. The project is expected to come to fruition, and hopefully to the satisfaction of the students who funded it, in late 2014.