By Dean Karla Zadnik, OD, PhD
Here’s the latest on the “bucking bronco” of our new building on the southeast corner of 11th and Neil Avenues that will house our clinic and associated functions and personnel. As of the first week of February, the building will no longer include a basement, will have a full second floor instead of a mezzanine, and will be six floors high overall.
The projects are moving along, but changes are constant and rapid, so please stay tuned to this station. The building will be unique in that the alleyway that services the retail businesses that front on the east side of Neil, south of our location, will remain a thoroughfare. We will have a part of our building, which
I’m affectionately calling “the wedge” between the main building and the 11th Avenue parking garage on floors one and two. The two parts of the building connect beginning on the third floor.
- The first floor will house the Hoya Eyewear Gallery, patient reception, billing and other key clinic administrative personnel, and our Vision Rehabilitation Service.
- The Binocular Vision/Pediatric and Vision Therapy Services will occupy the second floor.
- Our Contact Lens and Primary Vision Care Services will occupy the entire third floor.
- Floors 4-6 will house offices for faculty associated with the College of Medicine/Wexner Medical Center.
- The “wedge” will accommodate clinical faculty offices and open workspaces, a shared student/staff/faculty lounge, various conference and meeting rooms, IT, and a shop to service equipment.
- The building at 11+Neil will 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 11+Neil, so we are planning accordingly with renovations later this year to the Fry Tower.
- 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 include 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 and optics 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 to finalize the plans for the design/build architect and construct specific timelines for both 11+Neil and the Fry Tower. The current timeline would let us move in sometime in 2020. We can’t see the future without you!
