Baker Hall faces demolition

The University of Northern Iowa plans to demolish Baker Hall and renovate Bartlett Hall as part of a proposed construction plan intended to begin around 2011.

Due to unmanageable mold, heating, office size and accessibility issues, Baker Hall is currently slated for demolition. The departments currently located in Baker, which include English Language and Literature, Philosophy and Religion, Modern Languages, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, will
e moved to Bartlett Hall pending its renovation.

According to Morris Mikkelsen, the associate vice president of Facilities Planning, the university has explored several alternatives to the demolition, including complete renovation, partial renovation to accommodate code and accessibility issues and the construction of a new building to replace Baker. However, due to budget and sustainability issues as well as the increased scrutiny with which the state Board of Regents is now examining new construction projects, Mikkelsen believes demolition is the best option.

“How are we spending our resources?” said Executive Director of Residence Michael Hager. “Does it make sense to build a brand-new Baker? Or, if we’ve got a building like Bartlett where it needs to be renovated and we have the capacity. At the end of the day we’re ‘short’ a building, and so we have less energy we’re spending and less staffing that we’re using. So as an institution that really seemed to be good decision-making and that sustainability really factored in there, I think.”

As of right now the university does not plan to build any structures to replace Baker. Mikkelsen stated that handicap parking will still be provided in the area, and that the space occupied by Baker will be landscaped as a part of the central campus area.

Many faculty members with offices in Baker expressed opposition to the demolition, including religions Professor Martha Reineke, who explained that the majority of building occupants are in the humanities and, therefore, generally have several books.

“Where are we going to put our books? We are book-heavy people,” she said. “The state of Iowa thinks of offices like a corporate office, and when they redo Bartlett — unless there are weight-bearing walls, which means they’ll have to be the same size — we’ll be in little postage-stamp offices. How can we do our work without our books?”

Reineke believes that if professors need to keep their books at home, they will be far less likely to work in their office outside of their posted office hours, making them less accessible to students.

Additionally, Reineke said that the demolition of Baker Hall will result in the loss of its art deco architecture and mentioned the loss of art deco design elements that were already thrown out when Baker was turned into an office building.

“Architectural salvage people would have wanted to take every bathroom in this building ... and take them apart, and they could have sold them for significant money because they were, in their entirety, an art deco bathroom of the highest quality,” she said. “They were just gorgeous.”

Reineke, whose office has been in Baker for the entire 25 years she has taught at UNI, hopes to retire before the Bartlett renovation is finished.

While the renovation of Bartlett will result in a decrease in physical living space at UNI, Hager believes there will not be an overall deficiency in on-campus living space.

“Obviously if Bartlett goes away, there’s less physical space for the students to live, but we do have spaces that are not fully utilized: we have some double rooms that we sell as singles, and we would go back to selling them as doubles,” Hager said, adding that with the number of physical double rooms currently sold as singles, the university could handle all of the students in Bartlett if it closed down today.

Despite the university’s ability to accommodate that many students, UNI still experienced an excess of residents this year that forced it to offer overflow housing in residence hall lounges. Hager stated that this was caused by the number of double rooms sold as singles, a number which was determined by preliminary admissions estimates in January.

“What happened last year was there was an unusually low dip (in contracting) in January because of the economy and from January to August, the number of contracts from new freshmen skyrocketed uncharacteristically,” he said.

“We could’ve gone back to those students and said, ‘Look, we have more students than we thought we’d have, we’re gonna make you take a roommate,’” Hager said about those students occupying double rooms as singles. “Legally, we can do that. However, my sense from students is they don’t like it when we do that.”

Although an unintended coincidence, the construction of a new on-campus apartment complex in 2012 will likely alleviate housing problems.

“The timing (of the two projects) kind of overlaps, but they’re really not related to each other at all,” Hager said.

Hager expects the plans to construct a new residence hall to continue despite the recent budget reductions because the money for that project will come from room and board fees, not from state funds.