Vanderbilt gets rebuilt: farewell to a hovel?

Yale Administrators announced last week that renovations to Vanderbilt Hall will follow renovations to Timothy Dwight next year, interrupting the much-touted one-college-per-year pace now in its third year at Yale. While the decision's effect on housing at Yale has yet to be determined, Director of Project Management for Facilities Arch Currie was able to shed light on what these renovations will entail.

DAVID GEST/YH Further renovations await Vanderbilt, complicating room allocations for future freshmen and annexed students.

"The renovations to Vanderbilt will not equal the scale of the renovations to the residential colleges," Currie said, but added that "they will still be substantial." According to Currie, "All building systems, which include heating, electrical services and telecommunication devices, will be upgraded and addressed." Vanderbilt has been having problems in these areas, especially with the loss of heat through old windows.

Renovations will also include a thorough examination of the safety of the building. "We're going to take a look at the roof stability and things like that," Currie said.

Renovations to Vanderbilt will not include any major structural changes to the building. "With the exception of the modification of a few of the first-floor bedrooms to make them accessible to the handicapped, we're not going to be doing a lot of playing around with the internal structure of the building," Currie said.

The lack of structural changes to the building will likely mean that there will not be any major changes in the number of bedrooms in Vanderbilt or in the number of students living in the building. "Last summer we added four bedrooms in the building by cutting out a chunk of some of the large living rooms on the top floor," Currie said. "I think that now there's the general conception that the building is filled to capacity."

Vanderbilt will also experience a number of renovations merely for aesthetic purposes. "We're going to examine all the finishes on the floors, walls and wood trimmings, and refinish anything that doesn't look so nice," Currie said. In addition to refinishing these wood surfaces, all the walls and ceilings will be repainted.

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Attention will also be paid to the exterior of the building. According to Currie, "we're going to try to fix up the physical appearance of the building—we're going to dress it up a little, and give it a fresh look."

The original plan was to renovate Old Campus dormitories right alongside the residential colleges, because they are two separate building processes. But because Vanderbilt is such a large building and will require many different types of renovations, the Yale Administration decided, "It would be better to take the building out of commission for the 2002-2003 academic year," according to President Richard Levin, GRD '74.

"We started replacing windows on the building this past summer," Levin said. "Not only did that renovation take longer than expected, but we came across some other problems we knew had to be taken care of, and that couldn't be done in just three months."

The Admnistration has not yet determined how Swing Space will be occupied in the Fall of 2002, nor have they decided which students will be displaced from their residential colleges that year. "It won't necessarily be freshmen," Levin said. "There are many feasible options open to us—we just haven't decided which one would be best."

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Defending the Administration's actions, Currie said, "If the renovations to Vanderbilt were done only during summers, it would take a long time, and that would be extremely traumatic to the residents of the building."

According to Currie, when the residential colleges were evaluated five years ago to determine which were most in need of renovations, Old Campus residence halls were not included in the survey. Nevertheless, Currie said that in recent years, Yale has been renovating all the freshman dormitories in addition to the residential colleges. "Welch and Lawrance were renovated over the summer, and we renovated all the other dormitories a few years ago," he said. "So Vanderbilt was the only residence hall that hasn't had any major changes for many years."

Currie feels that the Vanderbilt renovations will signal the end of Old Campus renovations—for a little while, at least. "Once Vanderbilt's been renovated we'll be done with Old Campus for some time," he said. "And we can focus all our attention on the residential colleges."

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