Thursday, June 17, 1999
New building brings life to sciences
MU Middletown welcomes $10.6 M high-tech hall
BY JANET C. WETZEL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
MIDDLETOWN — When students walk into chemistry and life sciences classes at Miami University Middletown (MUM) on Aug. 24 for fall classes, they will be walking into a new environment.
Instead of the cramped, dark, remote and outdated quarters that had housed classes at Johnston Hall for more than three decades, they'll be enjoying the bright, new, high-tech $10.6 million Barry J. Levey Hall science building.
“I feel as if I'm going from a dungeon to a fish bowl — all these windows,” said Andrea Nolan, MUM laboratory coordinator, as she proudly showed off the new building Wednesday. “The space and the openness is just wonderful. We're soooo excited about this. It's all so neat.”
The entire two-story, red and tan brick building is a delight, Ms. Nolan said.
“It's fabulous. It's state-of-the art, bright and open and fresh, with floor-to-ceiling windows in the main hallway,” she said. “We want students to see that chemistry can be fun, interesting and exciting. The new equipment and labs will help.”
The science building, named for former state legislator Barry Levey, is the first new university structure on the Middletown campus in 27 years. The work got under way in the fall of 1997, but it took nearly 10 years for the building to move from idea to reality.
“Our science labs were original to the campus when we opened in the fall of 1966, said Dick Sollmann, MUM director of public relations and marketing. “We were really in desperate need of state-of-the art equipment and facilities. The science program is a growing program here. The Center for Chemical Education and the rest of the sciences are an integral part of general programs and (for) students taking a liberal education course of study plus those who are going into education and taking the science sequence.”
The Levey hall houses classrooms and laboratories for microbiology, chemistry, botany and zoology, space for the Center for Chemical Education, a computer room, space for experiments and research and a combined chemistry and Center for Chemical Education preparation and storage area and faculty offices.
There are now six laboratories instead of four, space for separate quarters for microbiology, botany and zoology, which have been sharing space, two stock rooms in stead of one, two new preparation areas, a large lecture hall, and much more.
Important additions include an environmental chamber for experiments, an animal room and a green house. There is also an instrumentation lab. They had the equipment for a lab before, but much of it was kept in storage for lack of space.
Most furnishings have been moved in. Ms. Nolan and Cari Phipps and Teca Gillespie, chemical technology majors who are also paid assistants, are moving the rooms full of supplies from Johnston Hall into the Levey building. Their work will continue for weeks.
They push metal carts loaded with supplies such as chemicals, test tubes, beakers, prisms, molds, up the incline to the new building. Hundreds of storage boxes are being moved, along with mountains of other items. That moving method seems to work better than loading the things onto a cart, then into a truck, then back onto a cart to go into the building, Ms. Nolan said.
Meanwhile, as the final work is being done on the Levey building, a major renovation of Johnston Hall has just begun, Mr. Sollmann said.
Crowded quarters for records, registration, admissions, financial aid and cashiers will be expanded, using space vacated by the chemical and life sciences, he said.
“As the university grows, the demand for those services keeps increasing. We haven't had the space for the needed expansion until now,” Mr. Sollmann said.
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