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UNC-Chapel Hill students, visitors, and alumni: Get ready for change.
The university’s alumni center and its Pit — an iconic sunken courtyard outside the student union — are all slated for transformational renovation, thanks to affirmative votes from the board of trustees’ budget committee on Wednesday.
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Here’s a look at how these campus spaces will evolve over the next several years.
The university is planning to build a major addition to the university’s existing George Watts Hill Alumni Center: a welcome center.
The welcome center would “establish a clear point of arrival while maintaining the identity of the Alumni Center and Carolina Club,” according to a presentation given to the board Wednesday.
The center would serve as “the primary starting point for prospective student visits and campus tours.” It would have a dual-level lobby and adjacent outdoor areas. Though the expansion would require the removal of some trees, Carolina is committed to maintaining the area’s wooded landscape, calling the planned welcome center “a lantern in the trees.”
Undergraduate admissions, which is currently housed temporarily in the student union, would move to the new welcome center as well.
Howard Wertheimer, associate vice chancellor for facilities services, says he isn’t aware of any plan for what will become of the university’s existing visitor center on Franklin Street.
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The board’s budget committee approved $5.5 million in advanced spending for the alumni center project Wednesday, and it will go to the full board for a vote Thursday. The renovation will ultimately be funded with alumni foundation dollars and philanthropy.
As for the Pit, known to many as the “social center of campus,” it will no longer be a pit.
University landscape architect Daniel Widis gave a presentation to the budget committee on why “transformative change” is necessary, even though “this space has a lot of memory and love” attached to it.
Widis envisions a single level of paving, which would avoid the stormwater and accessibility issues presented by the current sunken design. Undesirable foot-traffic patterns and dying trees are other motivating factors behind the change.
On that level, UNC would plant between seven and nine trees and install some permanent tables. Widis says this would allow for a “much more useful and dynamic space that students can enjoy.”
Widis estimates the plan will cost between 8 and 10 million dollars. The next stage is to hire a construction logistics firm, Widis said, to help figure out how to minimize disruption when renovating one of the highest-traffic locations on campus.
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