Brooke Sperbeck
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As he walks around the Warren J. Baker Center for Science and Mathematics, College of Science and Mathematics Dean Phil Bailey beams. He’s showing off the product of 20 years of hard work and is eager to talk about it with anyone who will listen.
“Does it look OK?” Bailey jokingly asks a professor passing in the halls.
“You did a good job,” the professor responds. “Thanks a lot.”
Bailey has been working on the construction of the building since 1993, when he and then-Cal Poly President Warren Baker came up with their vision that is now a 189,000 square-foot, six-floor reality. The nearly-completed building is even better than he envisioned. It will benefit not only students in his college, but the entire university, he said.
“You call it the Center for Science and Mathematics, but it’s for all students,” Bailey said. “If you just look, it was designed for students.”
With four terraces, multiple study areas and furniture for approximately 400 students in what Bailey calls “living rooms,” the building was created with students in mind, he said. It is now the second largest building on campus, only smaller than Robert E. Kennedy Library, and houses eight lecture-style classrooms with a combined capacity of 484 students, 64 faculty offices, approximately 50 state-of-the-art laboratories and about two dozen prep spaces and stockrooms, Bailey said.
According to Bailey, students in every college will take at least one class in the building during their time at Cal Poly, and many will take more than one.
“The thing about the building that you’ll see that’s different from probably any building on campus is that there’s tons of space for students,” Bailey said. “If we had every classroom and every laboratory filled to capacity at any one time, we would have probably 1,300 or 1,400 students in the building at that time.”
Equipment in the building is also unlike any the campus has ever seen. Two new nuclear magnetic resonance instruments — which cost between $250,000 and $300,000 each — will be available for undergraduate use, something Bailey said is unheard of at many universities.
“I talked to some new faculty members in physics that have been other places … and they said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this for undergraduates.’ This is very unique,” Bailey said.
Other additions Bailey is enthusiastic about are the seven studio classrooms in the building, which allow for the integration of lectures and labs. The rooms are set up so that students can collaborate easily with one another and have access to computers from their desks for interactivity during lecture, he said.
The studio classroom concept was designed by Bailey’s wife, former Cal Poly Chemistry and Biochemistry Department Chair Christina Bailey, and has not been implemented on this big of a scale at any other large university in the country, Bailey said. Though Cal Poly did have three studio classrooms before, professors will now be able to use them more, physics associate professor David Mitchell said.
“I was already teaching in a studio, but I will have the ability to teach other classes in the studio now with much more room, and I think that’s much better,” Mitchell said. “I can have students doing things a lot more, so absolutely it will help me a lot to run classes in a better way for students.”
The building is not only student-friendly, but environmentally sustainable as well, and it is expected to become LEED Gold certified, Director of Facilities Planning Joel Neel said. The building uses rainwater harvesting, a green roof garden and energy-efficient dimming with low voltage lighting control.
In addition, each of the 114 hoods in the building’s labs has an energy-efficient air system that will decrease electricity costs significantly, Bailey said. In the older math and science building, one hood alone used between $3,000 and $5,000 worth of electricity per year, the amount of a small cul-de-sac of houses, he said. With the new building’s AirCuity system, Bailey said energy costs will decrease.
“That is a huge energy savings, so we are significantly more efficient than a typical lab building,” Neel said.
Though these energy saving systems made things a little more “complicated,” the project is under its original construction budget of $119 million, Neel said. Thanks to $20 million from private donors such as Chevron Corporation and Dunn-Edwards Paint and $100 million from state funds, the Warren J. Baker Center for Science and Mathematics has “raised the bar for construction in the CSU,” he said.
“I think this is right on par with some of the best University of California buildings, and typically the California State University system has not had the ability or the budgets to build buildings on that caliber,” Neel said.
There are last-minute details that still need to be finished, such as hanging up the estimated $100,000 worth of art and installing frosted glass in the study areas that students can write on with dry erase pens, Bailey said. He hopes it will be completely finished by Nov. 1, when there will be a ceremony dedicating the building to Baker.
“Dr. Baker was the president for 30 plus years and he, as well as Phil, were instrumental in getting this project done,” Neel said. “Dr. Baker has made a huge impact on our campus.”