As the expansion of Kresge Hall continues, administrators are pushing to raise an extra $2 million to add a fifth floor to the new wing.
Kresge’s $12.5 million addition, which will house about 120 faculty offices, is being built with the option of adding a fifth floor even if the extra money is not raised, Ron Nayler, associate vice president for Facilities Management, said Tuesday.
“That’s the way the building was designed,” Nayler said. “We provided all the structure so that it would be very easy to build a fifth floor even if it was five years from now.”
For example, the building’s new pipes and ducts will exit through the side of the building instead of the top, Nayler said. This would reduce the number of people displaced if a fifth floor is built, he said.
A fifth floor could provide space for many uses, but Weinberg Assistant Dean Marvin Lofquist said the school has not decided on a specific function.
“Without having a fifth floor, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking of what you do with the addition,” Lofquist said. “I don’t sit around thinking about what I would do if someone gave me a million dollars.”
Possibilities for the fifth floor include a studio for the Master of Fine Arts program, now housed on Colfax Street, and the Center for Art and Technology – an interdisciplinary program involving the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Schools of Music and Speech – Weinberg Dean Eric Sundquist wrote in an e-mail. This would aid in one of the Kresge addition’s goals, to bring cooperating programs closer together. In Kresge’s basement, the CAT already works with the Multimedia Learning Center.
University President Henry Bienen said that while adding the fifth floor is important, he doubts whether Northwestern would be able to find a donor who will help finish the job.
“I had asked one of the folks who made a big gift if they could do the fifth floor,” Bienen said. “This was last spring, and they had come to all that they could do.”
The addition is being funded in part by a $5 million gift from the Mary Jane McMillen Crowe Foundation and a $1 million gift from Barbara Franke, Weinberg ’54. Kresge’s new wing will be called the Mary Jane McMillen Crowe Hall and the re-designed courtyard within the building’s new structure will be named for Franke, Sundquist wrote, adding that construction should be completed in a year.
In addition to faculty offices, the Kresge addition will house departments that could include philosophy, religion and Jewish studies.
Additional space in Kresge for the CAT would be the realization of a dream for the School of Speech, Dean Barbara O’Keefe said. She admits, however, that the discussions about the fifth floor are still speculative.
“This is one of those blue skies things where if everything worked out and we found the money, we’d be able to do everything,” O’Keefe said.
