The new dorm on Kent Street that will house athletes and several LLCs is before the BOV beginning of next week for design review. You can take a look at the following massive PDF (design review for dorm starts on page 523). Construction is starting shortly with targeted occupancy summer 2021.
https://bov.vt.edu/assets/june-2019-open-session-materials.pdf
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Fernley or someone else smart break it down into simple firefighter friendly review?
Someone here: Gonna be really new.
I don't hate it.
Merryman weight room renovations are in there to.
Sorry Fireman. Almost missed this. Thanks for the post! That's a meaty document for sure. Lots of interesting stuff in there.
For the new Res Life Building. Yeah, pretty damn good.
The facade is pushing a contemporary fusion with the old hokie stone dorms which I think is working well enough.
The 1rst floor is bang on the trend for now. A kind of WeWork open collaboration space that everyone can enjoy with Makerspace labs. The interior renderings for this space could not be more millennial (though a bit sparse) which is good thing. If they could add in a kiosk or two for coffee, drinks and salad/sandwiches then you got a winner. Maybe it's in there already. Hard to read details.
The upper floors 3 - 6 are prototypical arrangements for dorm usage mix so no real comments there.
Floor 2 floor plan is a bit of a mess though. Again, hard to read but it would have been ideal to have separate entrances to the faculty apartments and some understanding of who or what the outdoor classroom is for. Do these particular faculty use them? Or is it just a notion to be used by anyone? Also not a fan of the Faculty Courtyards. You got a lot of kids in this building. Restricting space for 2 faculty and their partners/guests is a poor use of space IMO.
Overall though, well done. Did you have any specific questions about it?
It's hard to read on my phone was looking to see what might appeal to student athlete recruits.
In general there's a lot to like. Like most students suites are what I see as the preference for athletes. Likewise, as noted, I think the ground floor will be very appealing. From what I can tell it is not specifically designed for athletes so there might have been program added if it were. Not sure what that might be but I'm sure there are good ideas out there if it were solely dedicated to athletes. The downside is that it does seem quite a distance from dining options and campus parking lot. Maybe VT has shared electric scooters to cut down on time or will in future.
so...no lazy river, putt putt, or laser tag?
How about a lazy river around the drill field that could be turned into an ice skating loop during the winter? I think that would have been a feature I would have used when I was at Tech.
Being far from dining options should not be a negative thing. We're talking about world class athletes, they can walk. I'm in the unpopular opinion that athletes shouldn't have special dorms, so I'm totally fine with them walking a bit farther.
I wasn't saying it as a negative specific to athletes. Distance to food is a negative for all students, student athletes included.
I still don't see it as a negative. If people want a small campus, go to a small school.
Distance to any desirable/frequent destinations will always be a negative. Distance to work, distance to food, distance to family, etc. It will never not be a negative when laying out a site.
Don't sleep on Owens Hall, which is less than 200m walk from the University Club site and contains both the Owens Food Court (multiple cuisine options) and Hokie Grill & Co (Chick-fil-a, Pizza Hut, BBQ)
Yeah this isn't really far from anything though, you're less than a half mile walk from West End, right across the street from Hokie Grill and Owens, and D2 in between. I mean don't get me wrong its not primo location like say Pritchard but I think we're all capable of walking half a mile for food without much complaint.
true, its not that long walk even to West End, but college me wouldn't walk further than Hokie Grill & Co except on Sundays...
Freshman year I ate most dinners at dietrick and I lived in Thomas Hall (RIP)
Same here. Still kinda weird walking by there and seeing a grassy field...
Just to be clear, any dorms housing athletes should only be fill 49% with athletes otherwise it would be seen as special treatment to athletes. So while the are dorms built for athletes at every college, us common folk get to enjoy the perks too.
I thought the rule used to be closer to 2/3 athletes at most? I had a buddy that scored a room in the athlete dorm back in 95 (Cochran?). They had a sweet cafeteria in there back in the day.
Not sure what the ratio was, but I was one of the token non-athletes in Cochran during the 06-07 year. That cafeteria turned into West End.
To the comments above in the thread concerning walking distance to dining, it matters. I am (and was at that time) a marathoner and triathlete, so the ABILITY to walk that far for food was not the issue. But when it's blowing snow or rain, being able to walk downstairs and grab food is a major perk no matter who you are. Not saying it's something that gets you ruled out by a recruit, but it's definitely in the mix.
As a grad student, my lab/second home was in Hahn south and you best bet that when I didn't pack a lunch and the weather was crappy, I would walk from Hahn through the shared stairwell into Robeson over the bridge into Pamplin, down through the tunnel into Johnson Student Center just to go to Subway since I didn't have to go outside.
I think Burress to ChemP (Hahn north) is the farthest you can go indoors on campus without using steam tunnels.
Although I never looked to see if you could get from burress to burchard (and thus, to cowgill)
No, not feasible. The building ends at the two stair towers, unless they have a secret door somewhere.
Cowgill does have a secret door to an upper mechanical floor. The entire floor is basically a giant air intake. It's pretty cool. You walk into these big rooms to change the filters.
A page number?
My bad.
Gotta keep up with the arms race at all costs. We might lose a few 4 star recruits if we don't build posh, vegas style dorms for ballers to stay in freshman year. All costs.
I disagree with most of this post, but I'd say "Vegas-style" is the most factually incorrect
Ok, what do you disagree with? there is no arms race? these new dorms don't impact recruiting? Most players only live in them freshman year? just curious as to what you disagree with.
Nah, I'm good.
LOL whatever
You know, I've been annoyed by DC at times in the past, but if it was anybody else on the receiving end of this particular exchange, they wouldn't be catching downvotes. IJS
Of course
but then again, perhaps people are voting based on prior history and not taking every comment in a vacuum.
I look, read, and leg or unleg comments before I look who the poster is. People have some great comments, people have some dumb comments. It depends on the content, moment, etc. Some of DC's stuff I agree with, some I scratch my head at.
Look, if we down vote DC every time he says something people dont like then we'll break the site, let's say Joe made the leg counter with an int in mysql, then that's 2 billion down votes to break stuff, which is just one GT thread, so maybe you shouldn't down vote him as much.
I don't? I think we're on the same side of this
My intention was not to turn this into a referendum on voting (as about a quarter of threads seem to turn into). However, it is worth noting that the exchange would not have happened to anybody else. The downvoting issue inevitably arises with the current system as there is no way to push back against bad faith arguments and trolling without engaging.
And when that engagement does happen, it routinely turns into an absolute shitshow of 50-100 comments of useless noise and pointed insults.
No. just no.
We are not a football institution. We are a great school that has a football team.
We are not in an arms race with the top dogs. And should not attempt to be. Compete with what we have and enjoy what success we have from that. But we should not sell our souls to attempt to be Bammer, Clemson, anOSU, etc.
That toothpaste is out of the bottle. Big Time. Rector wasn't good enough for indoor practice, so we built the largest (at the time) indoor. Our "new" locker room is less than 10 years old and is "outdated". Merryman is being renovated now, but eventually the football team will move completely from there into a place 3 times that size. We are building a new locker room and nutrition center now. Most recruiting experts say that the "dorm scenario" is a serious selling point for FSU, Clemson and PSU- thus these new dorms. We are squarely in the arms race-have been for a while.
Yes, we are spending money on it, but not "at all costs."
Edit: VT should not aspire to compete with these schools....
https://athlonsports.com/college-football/15-unethical-college-football-programs
via GIPHY
To be honest the updates to Merryman are probably bigger than the dorms from a player's perspective. It's not just the weightroom being updated, it also looks like the position meeting/film rooms are being redone too. They haven't updated those in at least 10 years so that's huge. I mean those guys probably spend more time in Merryman than their dorm room so I'm glad to see they're finally giving those the attention they need.
I don't think you're wrong, but we have actively been negatively recruited against regarding our dorms. Clearly anyone can and will sell facilities, but the new dorms should have a larger impact than what makes logical sense to you or me.
The interiors look nice, still not sold on the overall exterior space and image, but I kinda think most of the attempts outside of the Moss (and I'm still pissed how the Board of Visitors butchered that design) to modernize hokiestone have been a failure that won't age well.
Do you have any images of the original Moss design? I've never seen it
This is a really silly location for housing athletes. The location is better served for graduate students. The Washington St. tennis courts would be a much better synergistic site for athletes. Thannias was a goof and this is one of his less brilliant ideas I guess.
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If you really want to attract top flight talent then we need to get Southern X-posure updated, those places are dumps.
This is the kind of community development I can get behind.
Edit: Also a similar fine establishment closer to campus couldn't hurt.
LOL went there with a few buddies for my 21st over the summer (late 90's) and yeah, that place was ummm.... something else.
Yeah Princeton WV isn't the deepest talent pool in the world and they aren't generally concerned with the building.