By Dean Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD
In late November 2018, The Ohio State University Board of Trustees approved a building at the southeast corner of 11th and Neil Avenues that will house our clinic and associated functions and personnel. They also approved the necessary Fry Tower renovations that will facilitate moving the non-clinical administrative and some teaching functions to the sixth floor of that building. The projects are moving along, so I know more every day.
- A basement and sixth floor have been added to the building to maximize the available space on that corner. Our Binocular Vision and Pediatric, Vision Therapy, and Vision Rehabilitation services will occupy the basement. Floors four through six will house offices for faculty associated with the College of Medicine.
- The building at 11th and Neil will likely look traditionally academic from the outside and will have an open, welcoming interior with lots of nooks and crannies for informal interactions among students, staff, and faculty.
- Our expectation is that the A wing of Starling Loving and the Fry Bridge will be demolished soon after we move to 11th and Neil, so we are planning accordingly. This demolition is to allow for the remodeling of Hamilton Hall and construction of a four-story (plus basement) building that will stretch from Hamilton to Fry. Ultimately, we will have two 80-student and one 40-student classrooms in the new Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Learning Center. Our teaching labs will ultimately be located there too, but that will likely be the last phase of work in Hamilton. In fact, I think those labs will overlook Adriatico’s Pizza, which has happily moved to the northeast corner of 10th and Neil.
- We received a grant from the university to subsidize a student life space overhaul in the basement of the Fry Tower.
- We are actively working with architects and people from university real estate and planning to design the work that needs to be done in the Fry Tower. The sixth floor will be internally remodeled to accommodate the dean’s suite along with student services, advancement, communication, and financial/human resources staff. The large waiting areas on the fourth and fifth floors of the Fry Tower will become conference rooms. The anatomy, optics, and visual function teaching labs will be relocated to the north end of the Fry Tower basement. We have a swing space classroom identified in the M wing of Starling Loving for the foreseeable future.
Next steps are the hiring of a design/build architect and finalization of the funding and construction timelines.
The current timeline would let us move in sometime in 2020. We can’t see the future without you.