MRDC II near completion, opening this summer
By Bill Allen / STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
The MRDC II building has been under construction for longer than some students have been at Tech. It will be finished in the next couple of months.
The long awaited completion of Manufacturing Related Disciplines Complex II (MRDC II) is anticipated to be only two months away. Although the building should be completed and turned over to the Board of Regents in mid to late April, relocation will not begin until immediately after this semester. According to Ward Winer, Chair of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the delay is due to the disruption moving during the term would cause.
The building is L-shaped, with the smaller wing housing the headquarters and main offices of Materials Science and Engineering. The larger wing will house ME faculty and students. The building will consist mainly of research labs and graduate and faculty offices, along with three classrooms to be shared by ME and MSE, including one state of the art multimedia classroom.
MRDC II does not add more net space to the two schools because faculty will be moving out of buildings such as Coon and ESM.
Winer says that, "It'll give us much better facilities, but it won't give us much additional space." The building will also house several specialty labs for materials processing, including an acoustic lab, a fluid mechanics lab, and a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) lab. Winer believes that the underwater acoustic tank is probably the largest non-government facility of its kind in the country.
The building was paid for by state appropriations and cost approximately $30 million. The building is being named after J. Erskine Love, Jr. because his family gave a $5 million endowment to support ME. He was, says Winer, "a very prominent alum of the ME class of 1949." He founded Printpack, Inc. which prints packaging for food and other products.
The groundbreaking ceremony took place on Oct. 30, 1997. The building was initially projected to be completed by Fall 1999. The two and a half years of construction have blocked the path many students took from West Campus to class. Winer postulates that the area between the MRDC I and II will be a major thoroughfare for students. Therefore, this area will be landscaped and Winer believes it will be very attractive.
MRDC II will also feature a three-story glass atrium with main entrances to Ferst Street and the Courtyard area. There will be study lounges in the atrium and possibly laptop plug ins to connect to the building's high speed computer system, which will be a 100 megabit fiber optic cable to all the rooms and computer terminals.
There are two other notable features of the building. The roof is shaped to match the natatorium. In addition, the pipes sticking out of the roof are chemical hoods. Not all of them connect to an actual hood, but they were all placed on the roof for a uniform appearance.
Winer adds that he is very pleased with the building and glad to be getting people closer together. He feels that MRDC II is an "attractive building. One of the more attractive buildings on campus, as far as I am concerned, architecturally."
