By Jeff Powalisz

The Curry Student Center Ballroom will undergo major renovations this summer, with plans being mapped out to make the activities room more useful for students and visitors.

Initial plans include dropping the ceiling, changing the current concrete on the inside walls to cloth panels to provide better acoustics, installing a new wooden floor, putting on a fresh coat of paint and purchasing different lighting, all to give the room a feeling of ambiance.

“There is a clear plan that has been developed,” said Director of Operations for the Curry Student Center Bob Grier. “There is a clear scope of a construction program that has been approved and the plan is to begin this summer.”

The ballroom is the only room on campus that can seat a medium-sized group of 300 people. Instead of 300, the options dip much lower to 100 plus in lecture halls and then upward to 1,200 at nearby Blackman Auditorium.

“It is the most popular and flexible area on campus,” Grier said. “The auditorium is the auditorium. But the ballroom is multi-purpose and in that way, is really the largest space.”

Student Government Association Executive Vice President Allyson Savin has been active in the pursuit of renovating the ballroom, submitting reports to the Enrollment Management Student Affairs Focus Group with presentations.

“Between the student push and the recognized faculty need, things clicked this year,” Savin said. “It’s been a student initiative for years to make it less of an institutional box, and more of a desired program space.”

The ballroom underwent a renovation 10 years ago, but, Grier said, the clean-up, including a new floor and paint, never addressed the major concerns at hand – the noise levels and spatial ambiance.

“There is now a whole design clean up program [for the ballroom],” he said. “It will bring the room to a more serviceable level.”

Besides cleaning up the room in terms of its ceiling, walls and floor, plans also include making it more technologically sound, with new projector screens and lighting for both general and event purposes.

The ballroom is currently used for everything from dance parties, to ping pong competitions, to lectures and orientation events.

“The basic plan is to see the quality of programming increase,” Savin said. “Right now many don’t use the space because they don’t like it. Students will use it now, as well as the administration, to showcase a nice part of the campus space. Alumni groups will be able to use it as well.”

A task force will meet every Wednesday on the subject, examining plans with architects and planners for a total of six to 10 weeks. This will lead into the summer, where plans are to begin and end the renovation before classes begin in early September. Financial statistics are unavailable at this time.

“I don’t know the exact amount the ballroom has been budgeted for right now,” Savin said. “I do know that it made [Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance] Larry Mucciolo’s top 10 list of budgets for the year, though.”

The upcoming changes to the ballroom will be welcome changes to students who utilize the ballroom.

“There have been a lot of events that have been messed up because of the lighting,” said Rachel Haigler, a middler art major. “It’ll just be nice to have an improved, big room for entertainers and other events.”

The changes to the ballroom will benefit the student body and will benefit student orgainizations, as long as they are aware of the availability of the ballroom.

“It will definitely benefit the students,” said Tsufomu Suda, a senior psychology major and a member of the ASU (Asian Student Association). “I think more student organizations should know about it because it is for them.”

As much as the ballroom renovation will be a positive event for the student center, it will not solve the current demand for space at the Blackman Auditorium and other areas around the campus.

“It won’t help the problem of capacity or what goes on in Blackman,” Grier said. “The ballroom won’t be able to fit more people at the end of the day. It won’t be able to do a lot more than it does now.”

The entire goal of this undertaking, however, is to aid the student body in renovating an area of their main center on campus.

“Part of the idea here is that students are investing in this building,” Grier said. “Students can now see where their bucket [of money] is going.”