New Engineering building focuses on innovation, technology
The new engineering building is finished and ready to use sometime next month, said college of Engineering Dean H. Scott Hinton.
The $12 million David G. Sant Engineering Innovation Building, named for the late David Sant, was dedicated June 13 and was designed as a research building. Unlike the other two engineering buildings, there are no classrooms, just labs. However, Hinton said this isn’t necessarily detrimental to education.
“There will be a lot of learning going on,” he said.
The purpose of the building, he said, is innovation, coming up with new ideas and technologies.
Hinton describes the building as “modern,” having no specialty labs specifically designed for one grant project as is common in most labs. It is designed to be very modular, he said, to allow for many grant projects throughout the years. A lot of turnover in projects is expected, he said, as bringing in money to the college by those grants is a condition required of all faculty.
An estimated 30-50 projects of varying size are expected to be studied by the end of the semester, he said. Among these are studies on bridge performance in the West, seismic protection in structures and sustainable energy and biofuels.
The building is set up almost identically throughout all three stories, he said. The north and south walls are lined with labs and the middle “core” has a conference room, work room, storage room and restrooms. Workspaces are also on the upper two floors above the entrance.
The labs are unique in that they can not only change use for different grants but can alter size, as well, he said. Pillars in the labs allow for a large lab to be split into two or three small labs, he said.
“This allows us to put up or take down walls fairly inexpensively,” he said.
The labs also have glass walls facing the hallway, so students walking by can “hopefully pick up on the excitement of the research,” he said.
No floor of the building belongs to one department, he said, instead having all five departments represented on each floor.
The building was completed almost at budget, he said, and finished ahead of schedule. He said the construction was actually pushed in order to be finished in time for Sant to make it to the dedication. Sant died of cancer on July 27.
Sant got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at USU in the 1960s before moving to California. He was one of the major contributers to the building, donating more than $7 million in both building and scholarship donations to the college. Scholarship recipients were also present at the dedication.
The new building was USU President Stan Albrecht’s idea about three years ago, Hinton said, because of the significant growth of the College of Engineering.
‘It’s a relatively new idea that happened fairly quickly,” Hinton said. “It was definitely something that was needed.”
-lisa.m.christensen@aggiemail.usu.edu