By Michele Richinick
Northeastern officials recently announced specific plans for the design of a new residence hall, which will replace Cullinane Hall located on Saint Botolph Street. The new hall, called Building “K”, will be designed similarly to the West Village buildings and will house 600 students, said Jeff Doggett, director of government relations and community affairs, at the Community Task Force meeting in Raytheon Amphitheater Thursday.
Doggett said the Community Task Force, a city advisory group started in 2004 to plan new housing projects at Northeastern, first met a year and a half ago to discuss plans for this new residence hall, set to open in Fall 2011.
The construction of Building K is part of a 2004 amendment to the university’s Master Plan, said interim university interim spokesperson Jim Chiavelli. The construction of Parcel 18 is also part of this amendment, he said.
“We believe that having more students live on campus is important to our students and to the city, and I would say it fits well with the long term vision we have for the campus,” Doggett said.
The site was approved as a residence hall site in December 2006, and the university started designing it about three or four months ago, Doggett said.
It is important for Building K to be built because it fits with the university’s agreement with the community to build two residence halls, Doggett said.
Now that the university is building Parcel 18, “we need to live up to our side of the agreement and build the second [residence hall],” Doggett said.
Parcel 18 is expected to open in Fall 2009, according to a Feb. 28 issue of the Northeastern News,
Building K will have 150 four-person apartments and house students, said Clifford Gayley, associate principal for design of William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc., which is designing the hall.
The apartments will either have two double bedrooms or four single bedrooms, and they will all have a living room, kitchen and two-compartment baths, Gayley said.
The university is unsure if upperclassmen or freshmen will live in the new building, Chiavelli said.
The current Cullinane Hall is now home to the university’s building services and facilities departments, which will be moved to a yet-to-be determined location, Doggett said.
Kelly Brilliant, director of the Fenway Alliance, an organization that works to improve the environment of Boston’s Fenway area, said after the Task Force meeting that the residence hall is a great idea because it allows the college to have more housing for more students on campus.
“The institutions are unfairly squeezed,” Brilliant said. “I think getting kids on campus should be the goal for institutions.”
Doggett said the university looked at 10 on-campus sites when deciding where the building would be located.
“Ultimately, we all came together and made a good agreement,” Doggett said.
Building K is the first step in building the East Village on campus, Gayley said. Similar to the keystone role West Village A played in the creation of West Village, Building K is an important first step that will open up campus, he said.
“What we’re hoping is to see another [development] of housing in East Village to balance West Village to have more housing to get kids out of neighborhoods,” said Marc Laderman, a 20-year resident of Gainsborough Street who attended the meeting.
As part of the 2004 Master Plan Amendment, Gainsborough Garage was also approved as a site to build another residence hall, but plans to build additional residence halls in East Village will not be considered until the next Master Plan is made for 2010, Chiavelli said.
The next step for the project is for the university to submit a document to the city detailing everything about the residence hall’s architectural design, including a wind study and shadow study, Doggett said. Once the document is submitted, the university will hold more community meetings for the project to be reviewed by residents, he said. Eventually the plan will go before the City of Boston and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and construction will begin, if and when they approve it, he said.
Laderman said Building K is the result of a long process, but it is a well-received project.
“The main thing is to get kids out of the neighborhoods,” Laderman said.
With many college students living in the Fenway, “it is very difficult for people to raise families there with school-aged children. In order to open up more room for longer tenures in the neighborhood, we have been asking for more housing,” Laderman said.
Northeastern’s campus is welcoming to students because it allows them to move out into the city and it provides city life on campus, Gayley said. Building K will allow Northeastern to continue to create an attractive campus for its students, Gayley said.
“[The new building] certainly helps create a stronger sense of campus experience for their students and is very much a continuation of ongoing transformation that the university has been undertaking as it moves from a commuter university to being a top-tier university in the country,” Gayley said.
– News staff writer Michael Napolitano contributed to this
report.
