Friday, May 19, 2006

Campus construction

Here's another first look at a new building coming this summer to the UND campus: the Northern Plains Center for Behavioral Research...


Northern Plains Center for Behavioral Research

Construction is supposed to begin sometime this summer. The building will cost around $4 million and should be finished by spring of 2007. Researchers will use the facility to study everything from gambling addiction to Alzheimer's Disease. It will be adjacent to the existing School of Nursing building on the north side of University Avenue. Interesting to see construction of a new building so close to the heart of campus.

The most visible construction project taking place on campus this summer has to be the new parking garage under construction at the corner of Columbia Road and University Avenue. For those of you who haven't see what it will look like when finished, take a look...

Parking Garage

Impressive, huh? I especially like the walkway over Columbia Road. It will look like the "official" gateway to campus.

Then, of course, we have the gigantic Wellness Center inching closer to completion on the banks of the English Coulee north of campus...

Wellness Center

Ground has also been broken on the site of the National Center For Hydrogen Technology on the grounds of the Energy and Environmental Research Center. This project should be a real boon for the EERC and the city as a whole because it promises to bring many high paying jobs to Grand Forks.

There are many other smaller projects that will take place over the next few months at UND including a new roof for the Chester Fritz Auditorium and landscaping and parking lot improvements. Even if most of the students will be gone, it's going to be a busy summer at UND.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a busy summer of construction at UND and Grand Forks as well, growth is good. The city really does need to work on the downtown area though and the condo's will help, but they should look at getting some affordable highrise apts downtown, hotels and office buildings are also a plus, but easier said than done I know. Downtowns are mainly a business district. What hurt Grand Forks back in the 70's was when the mall went up, instead of Grand Forks turning their downtown into a business district, they enclosed a street and put up the city center mall to try and keep the shoppers downtown, big mistake. You look at the downtown now compared to like Fargo's and Bismarck's, their downtown's are thriving compared to ours and you can't say it's flood related because our downtown was like this even before the flood. Anyways, shops and stores are good for downtowns, but you also need to have people downtown, apts, offices, hotels etc.. will do that, can't rely on just the occasional shoppers. Question........what is the housing looking like in Grand Forks this year? are there a lot of single family housing going up? or just an average year? With all the big building going on, one would think that more people would be moving to Grand Forks. Have a good weekend everyone!