By Kavita Kumar

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Sunday, Aug. 10 2008

Students will soon be able to graze on duck spring rolls and pork shank osso

buco while sipping on a glass of chianti at the sleek red-and-black bistro in

the new Washington University student center.

Or if they're in a rush, they can choose from the food court's dumpling

station, freshly made sushi, wood-oven pizza, and the antipasto station with

three kinds of salami and olives.

So much for ramen noodles and cereal.

The new center also has a place where students can shower, play games on a Wii

or XBox 360, and (hopefully) find a job. The $43 million building features a

professional recording studio, three courtyards and even a gender-neutral

restroom to address the concerns of transgender students.

After two years of construction and more than a decade of planning, fundraising

and delays, the Danforth University Center — or the "DUC" as students have

already dubbed it — will officially open to the public on Monday.

Many universities around the country have built student centers in recent years

to replace decades-old facilities. Some of them come with price tags of $100

million-plus and boast perks such as movie theaters, pubs and putting greens.

Critics see such luxurious buildings as contributing to the increasing cost of

higher education. But proponents say they are important tools to help students

connect to campus and aid in recruitment and retention. In Washington U.'s

case, administrators say the campus previously lacked a space that functioned

as a true student center.

The three-story, 116,000-square-foot, green-friendly building brings to one

place the offices for career services, campus life, student government, and

various student groups such as the newspaper and television station.

The center, built with the same collegiate Gothic architecture as most of the

rest of campus, will help solve another persistent issue: parking. The building

sits atop an underground garage with 522 spaces. During the construction,

inconvenienced students derisively referred to the space as the "hole" while

Chancellor Mark Wrighton referred to it more affectionately as "the big dig."

Administrators hope the new university center will become a vibrant and central

meeting place on campus — the university's family room, if you will.

"Some of the buildings around here are intimidating," Jill Carnaghi, assistant

vice chancellor of students, said while giving a tour last week.

But she said the university wanted to make sure this one was more welcoming to

everyone, including the community at large. Hence the warm color palette

throughout — oranges, reds, yellows and purples — and the little nooks and

crannies where students can relax and study.

The Mallinckrodt Student Center next door will continue to house the bookstore,

performing arts spaces and the bank. That building is on the school's to-do

list for renovations, but plans are not complete.

Although Mallinckrodt, which opened in 1973, has many of the amenities of a

student center, it was not built to have spaces where students could congregate

and relax.

"It's just nice that everything is being centralized," said Laura Harbron, a

junior. "I just think it's really cool because before the Danforth University

Center, we didn't really have a student center."

When Wrighton arrived at the school in 1995, a new student center had already

been identified as one of the school's needs.

"It's obviously taken quite a while to bring it to reality," Wrighton said. "In

an academic setting where you have so many participants in the process, it took

us longer to build consensus as to what should be in the building. … Once we

decided to do it, everybody wanted to have space in it."

There were other hurdles. The university changed architects several years ago

and later decided to add the parking garage.

Fundraising was also a challenge, despite a big boost in the late 1990s when

the Danforth Foundation allocated about $15 million of its $100 million

university gift to the center.

And then there was the building formerly known as Prince Hall. Preservationists

balked when they learned the university was going to raze the turn-of-the

century building to make room for the new center. But the university went

ahead, saying the antiquated building could not be renovated in a meaningful

way.

Washington U. has begun work on another project this summer to build a new Wohl

Center, a smaller student center on the other side of campus known as the South

40. The $100 million project includes tearing down two residence halls and

building three new ones as well as the new student center. The school expects

to complete it by the summer of 2010.

Students have been especially eager to see the much-discussed "fun room" in the

Danforth University Center. A couple years ago, administrators took a group of

students to Colorado to meet with architects for a day and a half of workshops

to discuss what should go in it.

"We didn't know what 'fun' was," Carnaghi laughed.

The result is a space with chalkboard walls, big-screen televisions, video

games and two garage doors that can come down to make the space more intimate.

Jeff Nelson, a junior, can already envision students napping in the fun room's

comfortable chairs. Although he's happy with how it turned out, he was also one

of the students pulling for pool tables and foosball tables.

"Sure, it would have been nice," he said. "But those things are throughout the

residence halls."

Nelson, who has been giving tours of the center, said he could also can see

Ibby's — the sit-down bistro — becoming a popular place for students to take

dates. Although the prices there are steeper than at the food court, he noted

that it accepted meal points.

Nadeem Siddiqui, district manager for the school's dining services, has more

big plans for campus food. His goal is to obtain most ingredients from within

150 miles of campus.

Soon, they will be planting herb gardens around campus, he said.

And down the road, Siddiqui is hoping to bring in a tandoor — a special clay

oven in which to make naan, tandoori chicken, and other South Asian specialties.

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