Admins. relocate IAST II project to 3401 Walnut

Officials had planned to put the laboratory facilities in the Music and Morgan buildings. In a shift from their original plans, University administrators are likely to relocate the Institute for Advanced Science and Technology's computer science and cognitive science laboratory facilities into the 3401 Walnut Street complex, officials said. The IAST II project was originally slated to move into the Music and Morgan buildings at 34th Street and Smith Walk, which will be vacated as soon as the Music Department secures new facilities. The project is the middle phase of a three-part program funded by the U.S. Air Force designed to provide several science and engineering departments with state of the art research labs and facilities. The first phase of the project was the recently opened Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories, which provides space for the Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Medical Engineering departments. The 4-month-old proposal to change the original location of the project was confidential until last week, when the Air Force gave University officials the go-ahead for the change, according to Omar Blaik, associate vice president for Facilities Management. Over the last four months, facilities officials have insisted that the project would be housed in the Music and Morgan buildings. In a September 17 interview, Vice President for Facilities Management Art Gravina said plans to build the facilities in the Morgan and Music buildings were delayed because of the fire that destroyed the Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall. But Gravina did not indicate the possibility of relocating the project. Yesterday, however, Gravina stressed that "if we can meet the program needs of the departments and meet the financial constraints of the federal government and the state, I think we have a viable site" in 3401 Walnut. Facilities in 3401 Walnut will be vacated once the History Department on the third floor and administrative departments on the fourth floor leave the building in 1999. Gravina also said in September that the fire delayed proposals for a new home for the Music Department because the IAST II project and the department's future were supposed to be determined together. But the decision to abandon the Music and Morgan buildings as a potential location for IAST II was not due to the construction slowdown caused by the fire, Blaik said. In fact, moving the program into 3401 Walnut will probably take as long as waiting for the Music Department to vacate its two buildings, Gravina said. Despite the long wait, faculty who will use the new IAST II space said the 3401 Walnut location better serves the needs of their departments. The new location would "really make sense," said Mitch Marcus, chairperson of the Computer and Information Science Department and a faculty member of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. The ICRS and the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception lab -- another program that combines computer and cognitive science -- are already located in the 3401 Walnut building. "Having the department next to centers that combine computer science with mechanical and electrical engineering, in the case of GRASP, and linguistics, psychology and mathematics in the case of ICRS, is really going to help the parts of the program interact," Marcus said. He added that the original plan to move into the Music and Morgan buildings would spread the IAST project over too many buildings. Gravina said no decision has been made about what will be done with the Morgan and Music buildings, although the University has made a commitment to renovate their exteriors. "We want to understand our long-term planning before we decide that," he said. "We don't want to do anything and then decide a year later it was not what we needed."

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