With this year’s major campus renovations of Vanderbilt and Sprague halls approximately halfway done, a number of other renovation projects on campus have neared completion in the past few weeks.
The scaffolding on Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, or SSS, was taken down this month and scaffolding on the Peabody Museum is set to be removed soon. Renovations of the Divinity School, the Visitor Center and the Library Shelving Facility, as well as the maintenance project on Kline Biology Tower, are “substantially complete,” said Arch Currie, director of the project management division of the Office of Facilities.
Over the past five or six years, the Divinity School was fully renovated, Divinity School Director of Finance and Administration Richard Madonna said. In addition to installing new heating and air conditioning systems, the school updated its network and made the entire Sterling Divinity Quadrangle handicapped-accessible.
“We’ve modernized, we’ve brought the Divinity School into the 21st century,” Madonna said.
While all Divinity School facilities can now be occupied, the Office of Facilities will continue to do some final work on the school until April, Currie said.
The renovation to the Visitor Center at 149 Elm St. was a significant project, Currie said. The renovated center now has a new courtyard and elevator, and the Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty is now located on the second and third floors of the building, which previously were unoccupied, director Sheila Pastor said. She said some past additions to the center were also removed.
“Things had been added on over the years that were not worth restoring,” Pastor said.
The first occupants moved into the Visitor Center on Jan. 13.
The Office of Facilities also recently opened additions to the Library Shelving Facility in Hamden, which was built in 1998. The building was occupied after a ribbon-cutting ceremony Dec. 3, and staff are currently labeling shelves and putting material in the new additions, manager Michael DiMassa said.
The additions add 17,000 new shelves to the original 14,000 shelves, bringing the total number of Yale library books housed in the facility to approximately 1,250,000, DiMassa said.
“I guess we are the second-largest branch of the library,” DiMassa said.
With SSS draped in scaffolding for a number of months, the Office of Facilities worked to repair masonry and stonework and to refurbish the windows on the tower of SSS, Currie said. While the scaffolding has been removed, workers will complete additional work on the roof of SSS when the weather conditions improve, Currie said.
Currie said though the SSS renovation was mainly external, air conditioners inside the building were also replaced.
The Peabody Museum received similar repairs to those done at SSS. There, the masonry was also repaired and windows were replaced on the tower of the building. The scaffolding is set to come down shortly.
The Office of Facilities also worked in Kline Biology Tower to replace substantial mechanical equipment. The work on KBT, which was done while faculty continued to occupy the building, is part of a larger, continuing renovation project on the building.
“This is one phase of many phases of work,” Currie said. “I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to say that we’re done.”
Most of the sites are currently labeled “substantially complete,” with some touch-up work to be done. At both the Visitor Center and the Library Shelving Facility, some landscaping will be done once the ground thaws.