The Rice Thresher, Vol. 96, No. 18, Ed. 1 Friday, February 6, 2009 Page: 4 of 20
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4 NEWS
the Rice Thresher
Friday, February 6,2009
New building will foster collaboration, not vibration
By Jocelyn Wright
Thresher Editorial Staff
More construction fences will
crop up on campus in the coming
week as preparations begin for
a new physics building north of
George R. Brown Hall: the Brock-
man Hall for Physics. The build-
ing is scheduled to be completed
in December 2010 and was made
possible by a gift to Rice's Centen-
nial Campaign of an undisclosed
amount from the A. Eugene Brock-
man Charitable Trust.
Brockman Hall will be composed
of two wings — a south wing on the
ground with state-of-the-art labo-
ratories located underground and
a north wing that will be above the
ground and allow for landscaping
underneath the building, Facilities,
Engineering and Planning Project
Manager Joe Buchanan said. Plans
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Applications are due by Wednesday,
February 25 at 5:00 pm.
for the landscaping and exterior de-
sign have not yet been finalized, but
outdoor collaborative spaces and a
water feature such as a fountain are
under consideration.
Buchanan said the raised north
wing of the building will form a
new Science Quadrangle, which
was designated the "Court of Sci-
ence" in the earliest master plans
of campus. The raised wing will
also preserve the view from Ham-
man Hall across campus to Sid
Richardson College.
The basement of Brockman Hall
will be devoted to laboratories, the
first floor will house a large lecture
hall and a smaller seminar class-
room, and the second and third
floors will host additional labo-
ratories and offices, former Dean
of Natural Sciences Kathleen Mat-
thews said.
The observatory currently in the
parking lot next to the construction
site for the David and Barbara Gibbs
Recreation and Wellness Center will
be moved to the fourth floor of the
building to minimize interference
from the lights of the future Recre-
ation Center.
When the building opens, the
Physics and Astronomy department
will be relocated from Albert and
Ethel Herzstein Hall to Brockman
Hall and Herman Brown Hall. The
fate of Herzstein Hall is yet to be
determined, but Matthews said the
physics teaching laboratories will
remain there.
The building is the product of
nearly a decade of campaigning by
Matthews. Currently, experimen-
tal physicists are spread over five
buildings — Herzstein, Herman
Brown, Dell Butcher Hall, the An-
derson Biological Laboratories and
the Space Science Building — and
have to work in facilities that no
ill
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longer meet the demands of mod-
ern experimental physics, Mat-
thews said.
"I think what happens over time
is you get irrational uses of spaces
on campus," President David Lee-
bron said. "We're a small university
that should be bringing people to-
gether rather than separating them.
This building will give them [the
Physics and Astronomy Depart-
ment] a way to communicate with
one another in a way that's much
more productive."
Brockman Hall will also bring
the Physics and Astronomy depart-
ment together with faculty doing
related research from the Electrical
and Computer Engineering Depart-
ment, facilitating faculty interac-
tion, Physics and Astronomy Depart-
ment Chair Barry Dunning said.
"The new building and Herman
Brown are right next door, so the
consolidation should improve fac-
ulty interaction enhancing the in-
tellectual ferment and the cross-fer-
tilization of ideas," Dunning said.
"It's going to be a very stimulating
environment. It's going to bring
people together not just from our
department but also people with
closely related interests."
Dunning said physicists are cur-
rently forced to do any experiments
requiring sensitive measurements
and precise control of the environ-
ment, such as operating super-stable
lasers, very late at night when there
is no interference from people and
traffic.
"Experiments have to run through
the night because that is the only
time things are stable," Dunning
said. "The new building will enable
us to do these kinds of experiments
throughout the day."
One of the primary factors in
selecting the location for Brock-
□ BUDGET
FROM PAGE 1
Typically, decisions have already
been made around this time to allo-
cate 2-3 percent of the total payroll to
the pay-raise pool, which is then al-
located to deans and vice presidents
to offer pay raises to faculty and staff
based on merit and promotions, Col-
lins said.
In addition to the budget changes
and the delay on the decision con-
cerning pay raises, the staff hiring
freeze imposed in late November was
lifted last Wednesday.
"We ended it because the deans
and vice presidents really need to
be responsible about hiring for their
schools and divisions because it af-
fects how they manage the five per-
cent reduction," Collins said.
Hanszen College sophomore Will
Randall said lifting the hiring freeze
is a good thing.
"It gives Rice a competitive ad-
vantage in recruiting new professors
and staff that would otherwise likely
be recruited by Ivy Leagues or other
universities with money to burn,"
Randall said. "We should be able to
pull in a better crop of researchers
and professors."
Baker College junior Aurelia
Chaudhury added that because the
student body is increasing in size,
gradually increasing the number of
faculty in tandem is important.
Leebron said that although the
university will be exceeding its tar-
get endowment spending for the
year, between 4.5 and 5.5 percent,
surpassing the absolute boundary
of endowment spending at 6 per-
cent is not an option. Additionally,
decreasing growth in endowment
spending is a general priority that
the university will continue to pur-
sue, he said.
"There's some good news out
there," Leebron said. "As of the end
of December, our annual fund was
up over 15 percent. Our applica-
tions, right now, are up 14 percent,
and so those are important indica-
tions of the strength and health of
man Hall was the minimal amount
of physical and acoustic vibration
at the site. Senior Project Manager
Patrick Dwyer said approximately
10 sites were analyzed, including
Old Wiess Field, before the loca-
tion north of George R. Brown was
selected.
In order to further minimize vi-
brational interference, the laborato-
ries will be located in the basement
of the building atop a 2-foot-deep
slab which will absorb ground-borne
vibrations.
"If you were on a moving train
and you were trying to thread a
needle, the movement would inter-
fere with your capacity to do that,
whereas if you were on a very still
table and threading the needle, it
would be much easier to do," Mat-
thews said. "(The new laborato-
ries] simply provide from a vibra-
tion standpoint the capacity to do,
measure and manipulate things on
a scale that's not possible in a high
vibration setting."
Dunning said the architects, en-
gineers and steering committee for
the building visited several physics
laboratories around the country to
analyze different approaches.
"We learned what does and does
not work so we don't repeat their mis-
takes," Dunning said.
Each laboratory will have precise
humidity and airflow control as well
as clean power, which will keep ex-
periments being done in one labora-
tory from impacting another, Mat-
thews said.
Dunning said Brockman Hall
would allow Rice to recruit top re-
searchers in physics.
"It will be an enormous additive
in recruiting," Dunning said. "We can
offer state-of-the-art labs and give
them facilities as good as any univer-
sity, which was not the case before."
the institution."
Leebron also mentioned that
revenue from the impending growth
in the undergraduate student body
will boost the budget. However, he
said that scholarship costs will be
increasing rather than decreasing
because of the more lenient schol-
arship cutoffs that were introduced
last month.
"Although in some ways this is
a time when we need more money
from tuition because tne endow-
ment's down and because there are
only so many sources of funding, we
realize that a lot of peoples' families
are in worse financial circumstanc-
es than they were before," Leebron
said. "So it's actually cjuite difficult
to cut the cost in scholarships. And
although there will be some tuition
increase, it's probably not a time
when we can have an extremely
large tuition increase."
Randall said that although he
understands there are going to be
sacrifices and supports the admin-
istration's decision to give most of
the responsibility of budget cuts to
deans, he finds it strange that tuition
is increasing at all during such eco-
nomically difficult times. His father's
small business was hit by the strain
on the markets, he said.
leebron mentioned that his own
office will be making small changes to
save money, such as double-sided print-
ing and turning off computers at night.
"The only good side of an eco-
nomic circumstance like this is it
forces changes that are desirable
for other reasons that people might
have not even known were neces-
sary," he said.
Still, Leebron said that additional
steps might be necessary if the econ-
omy continues to decline.
"One thing that makes me ner-
vous is that the financial markets
haven't settled down, so this could
get worse," Collins said.
"Or the markets haven't settled up
yet," Levy added with a chuckle.
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Chun, Lily & Farmer, Dylan. The Rice Thresher, Vol. 96, No. 18, Ed. 1 Friday, February 6, 2009, newspaper, February 6, 2009; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth443063/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.