The new James B. Hunt Jr. Library on Centennial Campus has a total projected cost of $114 million and should be completed by Dec. 27, 2012, according to Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of libraries.
The N.C. General Assembly appropriated $17 million for the project.
The University also chose architectural firm Snohetta to design the library, which Nutter said will serve as a social and intellectual center for students.
“It’s going to feel more like a campus I think, if we get it right,” Nutter said. “We have to get it right.”
The library will primarily focus on the students that come to Centennial most often — engineering, textile and life-science majors — but Nutter said the University wants to open more space for other types of students on Centennial Campus as well.
“The chancellor and provost are interested for [humanities and liberal arts majors] to get a foot in the door of Centennial Campus,” she said.
The College of Textiles library will move to the new library, and the current Textile library’s building will be used for design studio space, according to Carolyn Axtman, design project manager.
The Hunt Library will be built on the southern part of the Oval on Centennial Campus, but Axtman said the University architects have not determined the exact location yet.
The architects are in the earliest planning stages, Axtman said, and the first step is programming and site analysis. This includes determining the needs of possible users of the library and looking at a site for where roads and utilities should be placed, she said.
Work on the planning will continue into the spring before the architects begin design, which will take two years, she said.
Jessie Stewart, an engineering alumna, said the facility could be helpful to those on Centennial Campus, but she did not notice a void without it.
“I never felt that disconnected from campus,” she said.
The Institute for Emerging Issues, a North Carolina think tank, will be an important part of the library when it is built. According to the group’s Web site, the IEI tackles critical issues and pulls experts to work around a certain issue every year.
The library will provide a visualization center available to anyone at N.C. State, so students and faculty can have access to the latest technology and use it for their own research, Nutter said.
The construction of this library could bring about more developments, which may include apartment-style student housing on Centennial, according to Nutter.
She said there are also plans to renovate D.H. Hill Library’s west wing further in the future, with a possible expansion to the Hunt Library after that.
A parking deck and a combination cafe and ice creamery are also in the University’s plans for the facility, Nutter said.
According to Nutter, there has also been discussion of putting a creamery in D.H. Hill, and she said this could help to compete with other land grant universities.
“We weren’t allowed to sell ice cream except in very limited ways,” she said. “Now [that] we have an exception to the Umstead Act, [we have] an opportunity for food science to show what they do.”
