Campus Construction Update, August 17, 2020

In this all-new Campus Construction Update, Associate Vice Chancellor for Finance and Operations Matt Dull chats with University Communications' Dave Blanks about Appalachian's two newly opened residence halls — Raven Rocks and Thunder Hill, which welcomed their first residents the week of Aug. 10. Dull also provides updates on the construction progress for Laurel Creek Hall and the demolition progress on Justice Hall.

Transcript

Dave Blanks: Hey folks, this is Dave Blanks from University Communications, and I'm actually on-site at — where are we, Matt Dull?

Matt Dull: We're at Thunder Hill Hall.

Dave Blanks: Oh my gosh. Can you believe it? We're here in person. Matt, we've talked about this so much!

Matt Dull: Eighteen months of talking about it and today's the first day you get to see it.

Dave Blanks: I got to say I'm pretty impressed. It looks great. We're going to wander around just a little bit inside and yeah. You're gonna show me around?

Matt Dull: Yeah, we'll do the grand tour.

Dave Blanks: We'll see the ... what is the flooring called? That terrazzo.

Matt Dull: The terrazzo floor as you walk in the door.

Dave Blanks: I can't wait.

Dave Blanks: Matt, that was us. That was us just last week. Thunder Hill and Raven Rocks. It was good seeing you in person because I hadn't seen you in person in I don't know how many ... months, like five months or something like that.

Matt Dull: The last time I saw you was like two seconds in the parking lot at Lowe's Hardware, when the state opened up and started allowing people to go into retail stores again, and we waved from afar. I think that's the last time I've seen you.

Dave Blanks: Well, man, it was a cool experience. Kind of surreal because we've talked about it so much and then getting to see Thunder Hill and Raven Rocks right there in person. It was pretty awesome.

Matt Dull: Yeah. Well, what'd you think when you were there? We were touring around with a little bit, you know, with the chancellor and a few other folks from Housing and looking at the buildings. But what'd you think?

Dave Blanks: It was fantastic. They look great. They look really, really good. It's like all of our hard work — not that I've lifted a finger, but I've felt some pride in it. So, I don't know what that says, but I'd say that's a good sign. But yeah, I was really very impressed. I love the entryways. We entered right there on Stadium at the student service desk, the key desk. I keep thinking about the little baffles that are hanging off the ceiling in there. It's kind of a minor detail, but like, I really liked those a lot. I'm not sure ...

Matt Dull: Kind of a natural would look, too, that was mean to kind of break up the ceiling a little bit.

Dave Blanks: Yeah, it was very cool. I liked that a lot. And yeah, I mean, it was better than my dorm, my residence hall. I felt like a slight tinge of jealousy.

Dave Blanks: Oh, the topographical maps on the wall. Oh, that's a such a really cool touch. Yeah. I was super, impressed. I thought it was great, again. Yeah. It was really good to see you.

Matt Dull: Yeah. Good to see you. I'm glad we were able to do that. It's just, it's kind of fun to show off to people. It's been such an awesome project, and it has been a long time coming and it's just been good to tour the building with a few different folks. And then now getting to see students move in over the past week and really getting to see their excitement and their family's excitement about being in the building. And I've talked to the number of parents who were like, "Well, last year my child was in Justice Hall and this year they're here and they just love it. It's amazing. It's great." So, it's really cool to hear from parents and from students just that are moving into the buildings and hear positive things about their experience so far.

Dave Blanks: So there's so much natural light too, which I know is something that was an intentional design, but the little nooks, the little study nooks and areas at the end of hallways, which, in my experience, were pretty dark in my residence hall, are just lit up and you get so much of a view of campus and you can see the surrounding mountains and trees.

Matt Dull: Yeah. There's so many awesome little spaces, too. I just think if I was a student trying to figure out like all these little spaces in these buildings that I'd just go and like pull the little chair around so I could see outside and have these big, beautiful kind of floor-to-ceiling windows and watch it snow or rain like it is today when we're recording and do homework or study or just sit and listen to music. I could just see myself in these spaces and that's been the nice part about developing these new buildings is really developing with kind of a student in mind and the resident in mind, which was probably a little different from, you know, when we were building buildings and in the '50s and the '60s, you know, they were truly dormitories. I mean, it's, you know, how can we cram as many people into the building as possible? And, you know, that design has changed, you know, over time of just really thinking about, you know, how do you build places that are community spaces, where people can be out and about outside of their room and have community with each other. And, but also have these kind of spaces that are good study spaces. A lot of our older residence halls, as we've remodeled them, some of the ones that we've remodeled, we've added in study spaces and added in small group settings and slightly larger lobbies. But if you go back to the buildings that we're replacing, you really don't see that in the buildings. There's really not a lot of places where, you know, if you just wanted to get out of your room and find a place in the building and just study somewhere else, maybe you're roommate is watching a video or playing video games or you know, just hanging out in the apartment or in your suite and you just, you gotta focus and you gotta study. There are places throughout the building for that, which is really exciting, cause that's not really been an opportunity in the buildings that we're replacing. Those older tower residence halls really just didn't have a lot of common space. You know, they're pretty heavy density beds. Creating some small-scale study space for students, I think, is still really important because we hear that over and over from students, that there's really just, despite having all of these different spaces on campus, there just doesn't seem to be enough spaces for students to do group projects and group studying or individual studying and not feel like there's a bunch of other people around. So it's been pretty exciting to develop these buildings with that in mind and make sure that there are plenty of those small kind of scale spaces throughout the buildings for students to really study or be able to find some, you know, some privacy in that kind of, you know, within a building that has a lot of people in it, but still have an ability to have quiet or private spaces. It's like in your house, you know, trying to find, you know, having your own kind of personal space.

Dave Blanks: Yeah, that's a nice idea. That sounds good.

Matt Dull: Dave's like, "What's that like?"

Dave Blanks: Hypothetically, yes, that would be great.

Dave Blanks: There's no personal space anymore. But, well, what do you want to cover as far as updates go for today? Anything left to say with Thunder Hill?

Matt Dull: Well, you know, I mean, I think we already talked about most of it. We got a certificate of occupancy for the building. We've had a really smooth student move-in over the past nine days, a nine-day period move-in, which is different from how we've done it in the past. And that was really intentional to try to spread out how many people were kind of in those common spaces of buildings or trying to use the elevators, or really moving into the building and really de-densifying what that looks like. And that's not just in Thunder Hill or Raven Rocks , that's really across all of housing. So, that's been a really positive experience. You've got to find some silver linings in the time of COVID. And that's really one of them, I think, is just being able to have a much smoother move-in process that's over a longer period of time that just really, you know, allows people to take their time, to move in and get their things and belongings into their spaces and not necessarily be, you know, trying to navigate a whole bunch of other people while they're doing it. You know, right now we're going through kind of those close-out, punch list items that, you know, especially as you've got students and people living in the halls, you know, they're actively using all of these different systems, using them at the same time. You know, you never really have an opportunity to, you know, go through and flush, you know, 25 toilets at the same time when you're constructing a building. And now you have the opportunity to do that. And you'll, you know, there's little tweaks and things we'll make to the systems to be able to adjust the system with things we find out as students who have been living there. So those are the kinds of things we're going through right now. Just doing those like punch list item things, you know, sometimes our students will find things that have issues in their rooms that no one's really noticed before. So, students in both of those buildings do have an online forum that they can use to let us know about issues in their room. And our awesome project management team is going through those requests really about every hour or even more frequently than that to prioritize them and then work with the Choate team to resolve those issues as quickly as possible. We've got a mechanism for students to be able to kind of let us know about those little things. "Hey, my lock doesn't work. Hey, you know, there's some missing paint here or, you know, the faucet's only cold water right now." So, that allows our team to quickly respond and go in and make sure we've got the issue resolved for the students.

Dave Blanks: Nice.

Matt Dull: That process will probably continue here over the next couple of weeks, just as students find different things. And then we'll really work hard on really trying to get that final kind of close out of the building where we've hopefully addressed every kind of issue that folks will have in the building, you know, about in the next, you know, couple of weeks.

Dave Blanks: Yeah. Right on same story with Raven Rocks?

Matt Dull: Yeah, same story, with Raven Rocks. It's kind of the same, same process, you know, just students have moved in and really helping us identify what things may need to be touched up or fixed. Now that we have, you know, the building occupied, you just learn so much more about what's working and what's not once you actually have people in the building. But again, same thing for Raven Rocks. There's an online process for students to be able to request help in their room with different issues they might be having.

Dave Blanks: Perfect. Where do you want to head next, Matt?

Matt Dull: Well, we can talk a little bit about just kind of Building 300 or Laurel Creek, which is part of our phase two project that's ongoing. And again, we're planning to have that building online for next fall. So we're now right at about 12 months out from a completed Laurel Creek Hall and the foundation for most of the building, elevator and stair towers, that's ongoing. Most of the elevator and stair towers are complete. There's a little bit of foundation that will be poured. It started last week and will continue this week. Framing is ongoing on one wing of the building. It's the wing closest to Trivette Hall, and then we'll start bringing in steel for the other wing of the building this week. And that will be closely followed behind with starting framing on, and that's on the side, that's farthest away from Trivette Hall. So this is kind of like a V-shaped building. One of those V's is kind of over toward the new parking deck and then the other half of the V, if you will, is kind of next to Newland Hall and Trivette Hall. And so we'll be kind of working almost, you know, maybe a week or two apart from each other, but really trying to work in parallel on each wing of the building as we move up, it'll be very similar activities happening as the building is constructed on each wing.

Matt Dull: So, we have one crane on-site currently. We'll have our second crane on-site this week as we start that steel erection on the wing that's closest towards the Stadium Parking Deck. So lots going on there. We're making great progress on schedule right now with that. And just really looking forward to having the framing really move forward and finish up because that really helps people kind of envision what the building's going to look like and kind of the size of the building and the footprint of the building. I think it'll also help people really just see how awesome and what a great space it's going to create between Laurel Creek and Raven Rocks. That's kind of our Duck Pond Field replacement that we've talked a lot about kind of early on in this process is going to be in that courtyard. I think as Laurel Creek is framed, it really will help people understand what footprint will be kind of that big courtyard or quad area. That's going to be our Duck Pond Field replacement. So, we'll really be able to see that start shaping up here as we get through the fall semester.

Dave Blanks: Cool. How's the progress on the Justice demolition?

Matt Dull: Justice demolition continues, and that's going to continue really through kind of Halloween, late October, early November. We'll kind of continue to see that, kind of, mechanical demolition of the building and then the sorting of the materials for recycling. So yeah, so that that'll continue. We're still moving forward with that. We've got probably another two, two and a half months left on that demolition before we get to kind of that building pad for New River Hall which will be ... we talked originally about Building 400, but New River Hall as the name of that building. And we're progressing on the design for New River and we've submitted all of our drawing sets to town of Boone for their review of that building. So, we're continuing to move forward with construction on that site.

Dave Blanks: Perfect. Yeah, on the tour, a couple of times you did still refer to Thunder Hill and Raven Rocks as like 100 or 200, but like, you're slowly working toward actually using their proper names now.

Matt Dull: That's right. You just get so used to for, you know, two years probably before we named them calling them the same thing. And then it's ... old habits are hard to break.

Dave Blanks: I understand. Well, any more updates for today, Mr. Dull?

Matt Dull: I think that about wraps it up for today.

Matt Dull: All right. Awesome. Well, if anybody wants to see any of the latest pictures and information about construction here at Appalachian State, what's the website?

Matt Dull: That's appstate.edu/future.

Dave Blanks: Perfect.

Dave Blanks: How am I going to incorporate this into the podcast? Do you have any idea?

Matt Dull: Maybe we can sign off this way. Let's try that.

Dave Blanks: Sounds good. And now from the site of the P3 project with Raven Rocks and Thunder Hill already complete, I'm Dave Blanks.

Matt Dull: I'm Matt Dull.

Dave Blanks: And we'll talk to you next time. Hey, we've never done one like that. That was pretty good.