Dana Hall’s future users are scheduled to begin moving into the building starting this coming Monday, Aug. 15.

The move is one of the final milestones in a comprehensive renovation that was years in the planning and about 14 months in execution. The academic building formerly known as Dana Chemistry Hall will open as fall semester classes start on Sept. 7.

Built in 1965 as a center for chemistry teaching and research, Dana exits the renovation with a broadened mission: It’s now the home of introductory education in biology and chemistry at �ֲ���ý, but also houses state-of-the-art general classrooms for use by all academic departments.

Dana Hall’s second-floor lobby. The entrance at center left opens onto the Historic Quad. The workbench at center is used for cutting plastic lenses for ceiling light fixtures like the ones overhead. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A general-purpose classroom on Dana Hall’s second floor. The modular furniture can easily be reconfigured and moved around to suit various active-learning situations. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Shown in Dana Hall’s attic, this shiny new contraption supplies compressed air to the labs. The dusty compressor at left was brought in temporarily for use in system testing. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A furniture supplier’s car is among vehicles parked at Dana Hall on Aug. 3. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A third-floor study room in Dana Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Pulling a ceiling tile into place in Dana Hall’s first-floor “living room.” (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana 119 is an introductory chemistry lab. The temporary plastic film on the fume hoods keeps out dust and other contaminants. The rod projecting from the ceiling is the mount for a projector. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall’s first-floor lobby. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Labeling various system components was one of the few tasks remaining in Dana Hall’s attic during our Aug. 3 visit. These HVAC ducts expel waste air from the building. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The repurposing is part of a greater transformation of science facilities at the college that has also included construction of the Bonney Science Center, which opened nearly a year ago.

In addition to redefining Dana’s academic role, the makeover vastly improves the experience of simply being inside this building at the heart of campus. Once known for a confined and confusing interior layout, Dana now boasts bright, open interior spaces and vastly improved wayfinding.

Credit there goes to the Boston architectural firm Payette, which also designed the Bonney Science Center. And the two buildings now share a bold visual style distinguished by a white, gray, and lime-green palette, clear sightlines, and a certain sense of industrial chic.

The college received a municipal certificate of occupancy for Dana in June, and �ֲ���ý and project construction management firm Consigli Construction have formally agreed that the project is “substantially complete” — meaning that operational control has reverted to the college.

While the list of folks to be based in Dana is still in flux, a few are confirmed: Bruno Salazar-Perea, a lecturer in biology and the faculty fellow for medical studies; Alyson Farrington, assistant in instruction in chemistry and biochemistry; and staff from the Environmental Health and Safety office and from the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning.

Two or three days should suffice for moving people in, �ֲ���ý Project Manager Chris Streifel said in an Aug. 3 interview. As for inanimate objects, virtually all furniture is on site, if not all in its allotted locations. And supplies and implements for scientific work? “Alyson has tons of stuff for the general chemistry labs” coming in from the Bonney Center, Streifel said.

“That’s far and away the biggest single cluster of things. Then there’s a mishmash of stuff coming from Carnegie Science Hall for the biology spaces. The move is really not a big effort, at least compared to moving into Bonney last summer.”

But Streifel also noted that tangled supply chains continue to affect the Dana project, if not in a decisive way. “There’s an autoclave that we’ve been waiting on for months that still has an unknown delivery date. We’re seeing slowdowns in some other science equipment that we ordered quite a while ago.”

He added, “The furniture that we ordered with ample lead time, well, it certainly came down to the wire in a couple of cases. But there’s nothing still [missing] at this point that should waylay us from opening for classes.”

As for work on the building itself, the chore list had gotten pretty short when we visited Dana last week. A substantial number of doors still awaited installation, a process slowed by a shortage of workers in that particular trade. (Our suggestion of hanging beaded curtains as a stopgap measure was politely rebuffed.) There was painting to finish as well. 

In terms of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, the building-wide tests collectively known as commissioning are wrapping up, Streifel said. Scheduled for late last week was the integrated systems test, which focuses on things electrical. “We’ll turn everything off and turn it on and see if it comes back the way it’s supposed to.”

Punch lists are being closed out, meaning that remaining defects are being addressed. Last Friday, the project team was slated to review that process one last time with Payette principal architect Michael Hinchcliffe.

Six years into the relationship between �ֲ���ý and Payette, Streifel characterized the Boston firm as “fantastic” — expert, engaged, and supportive. “When there’s a need for something, they’re there to provide it,” he said. “They’ve put together a good building for us” — again.

“This space is going to work really well for us for many decades to come.”

When slabs collide

Deep in the renovation zone on Chase Hall’s first floor, �ֲ���ý project manager Kristi Mynhier points overhead.

In a part of the building where demolition has left little but structural elements, removal of the suspended ceiling has revealed two very different surfaces.

With a massive steel beam at their junction, each surface is the underside of a concrete floor slab. One slab comprises long, pale panels of concrete. But the concrete substance of the other can’t be seen from here: It’s atop a dark complex of steel parts and a layer of paper.

We’re visiting an area where, as part of the 14-month renovation of the �ֲ���ý landmark, a pair of restrooms will be built. This is along the junction of the two additions to the century-old original building: Memorial Commons, opened in 1950, and a 1978 expansion of the dining area that resulted in what came to be known as the Small Room (or the Tool Shed, a snarky allusion to the more studious undergrads who were rumored to gather there).

It’s slightly poignant to consider that the restroom will be used by people who, unless they closely follow Campus Construction Update, have no idea of the history over their heads.

As part of the 1950 renovation, the paper-lined slab was cast in place atop tubular steel joists, explains Consigli Construction’s Michael Carpentier, project superintendent for the Dana and Chase renovations. (Consigli is the construction management firm for both renovation projects.)

Gaping holes in these Chase Hall walls were once filled with post office boxes. Soon the walls will be gone, too. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Half of Chase Hall Lounge has undergone asbestos abatement during the past few weeks. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A new stairway will pass through this former College Store space. The floor has been precut to ease its demolition. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Bereft of wall, ceiling, and floor coverings, Chase Hall’s first-floor lobby hardly looks like itself. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A new elevator and a new stairway will be placed near the OIE reception area, shown at rear. But first the entire floor slab will be removed. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Situated at the east end of Chase Lounge, this space will be hard to recognize after the Chase Hall renovation. The single door into the lounge will be replaced by double glass doors, and the stairs will become a ramp leading to a landing for a new stairway and elevator. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Chase Hall under renovation on Aug. 3, 2022. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

While the exact process isn’t known, it’s possible that the paper was used to constrain oozing around removable wooden forms that actually supported the concrete as it cured. Similar techniques were used in Dana and Pettigrew halls.

The 1978 slab, meanwhile, “is a panelized precast system set over steel beams,” Carpentier says. “These panels were fabricated offsite and craned into position before installing the roof structure.”

Such discoveries exemplify the archaeological appeal of building renovations — especially when the building is as old as Chase, built in 1919.

Both Consigli and Canal 5 Studio, architectural designers of the renovation, are doing what Mynhier calls a “phenomenal job” harmonizing the project goals with campus affection for Chase — and with the sometimes-challenging realities of a building with a mind-bending history of makeovers large and small.

If surprises come with every building project, Chase Hall is especially rich in “What the…?!” moments. The junction between the two additions, for instance, poses its own puzzle for the project team to solve — but it’s underfoot, not overhead.

As Mynhier says, “We have got the flooring contractor working to see what we can do, as far as prep goes, so that we can successfully install new flooring” over the joint between the additions’ subfloors, a groove that zigzags across the space.

Continuing the surprise theme, we told you last time about a bunch of them clustered in a section of Chase’s second floor that’s laid out in rooms — most recently, Student Affairs offices — branching from a central corridor.

One such surprise was the presence within two walls of load-bearing columns where the building plans showed no such thing. The walls will be removed as planned, rendering three smaller rooms into one flexible student-activities room, but the structurally necessary columns will stay, joined by a few new ones.

“We’re reworking the furniture plan around the columns,” says Mynhier.

In other Chase news, hazmat-abatement firm Acadia Contractors continues to remove asbestos-bearing materials at specific sites in the basement and on the first floor. Abatement on the latter has included a big chunk of Chase Hall Lounge and a section of ceiling near the door that opens into the Carnegie Science–Chase Hall courtyard.

The later assignment entailed the removal of both materials hazardous and otherwise. “Instead of having two different trades mobilize, we just had Acadia perform selective demolition to get to where they needed to abate,” Mynhier explains. The ceiling job will make way for a new layout of walls, stairs, and access to Campus Avenue — taken together, a defining outcome of the renovation.

But Chase, of course, has two entrances onto Campus Avenue, and both will be dramatically reconfigured in the renovation. At the entrance near Bardwell Street and the Muskie Archives, visitors will find a new elevator and stairs designed to streamline access to the Office of Intercultural Education and other key facilities at that end of the building.

In preparation for those new features, the demolition of large expanses of floor slab on three levels began late last week. Consigli is knocking out the sections of slab.

Mano a Mondo

The new Mondo rubber surface on �ֲ���ý’ Russell Street Track should all be in place early next week.

Then the surface has to rest for 30 days, allowing sunlight to cook off a paraffin coating from manufacturing, before it can be striped. That paintwork, using a proprietary product made by the track-surface manufacturer, will be the final step in the project. The paint dries to the touch in as few as 10 minutes and as many as 30, depending on weather, but needs up to three days before it’s ready for use.

The Mondo Sportflex Super X 720, a two-layer product produced by the same Italian firm that supplied the track’s original surface 21 years ago, was delivered on July 25 by eight tractor-trailer rigs, and installation began the following day. 

While �ֲ���ý’ varsity track and field teams won’t use the facility till spring, there’s still time pressure on the resurfacing project, from the soccer program, whose first home games take place Sept. 10 with both men and women playing Bowdoin. Because the soccer pitch sits inside the track, players will have to walk across the track for the games, and the Mondo installation needs to be done by then.

In the meantime, notes �ֲ���ý Project Manager Paul Farnsworth, he and project contractor Miller Sports Construction of West Chester, Pa., worked with Facility Services to program the soccer field irrigation system so the track would be dry where subcontractor Wicked Flooring of Rockford, Ill. (an Illinois company with a New England name!) needed to lay Mondo each day. (Watered every other night, the grass field is divided into 16 irrigation zones that the system cycles through.)

We explained previously that gluing the Mondo into place is about as hands-on as a job can be: It’s done by one man wielding a hand tool. But it turns out that much of the Mondo work has required the armstrong method.

The rolls were unspooled and positioned by hand, stretched around the curves by hand, and their edges trimmed and joined by hand — again, by a single worker with a hand tool.

Placement of the new Mondo surface on the Russell Street Track was well underway by the morning of July 28. (Paul Farnsworth/�ֲ���ý College)

Tim Moehling of Wicked Flooring uses a forklift to move a 50-foot roll of Mondo track surface on July 28. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

A team from an Illinois company with a great New England name, Wicked Flooring, of Rockford, lays out the new surface on the Russell Street Track on July 28. The concrete blocks will be used to hold the edges of the surface down while glue dries and cooler air causes the Mondo surface to contract. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Corey Ernst of Wicked Flooring, the Illinois-based subcontractor laying the Mondo surface on the Russell Street Track, hand-trims an edge to ensure a perfect fit. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Workers purposely overlap the Mondo sections to allow for expansion, then trim the sections to fit. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

The label on an unopened roll of Mondo Sportflex Super X 720, the new running surface on the Russell Street Track. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

On a day when our colleague Jay Burns, �ֲ���ý Communications editorial director, was photographing progress at the track, the Wicked Flooring cutter-trimmer was Corey Ernst. Burns learned that all told, Ernst would make more than a mile of trims, changing the blade in his knife every 30 feet.

He asked Ernst if he gets into a flow, in the psychological sense. “Yeah,” Ernst said. “You kinda have to, if you’re going to do this work.”

As the 50-foot strips are unrolled and placed side by side, workers slightly overlap the sections to allow for expansion in their width. Then Ernst comes through, trimming the overlaps. After the surface is glued in place, the seams are weighted down with blocks.

Elsewhere on Farnsworth’s summer chore list, the upgrade of the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning system at the Olin Arts Center is progressing. In the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art, new in-wall insulation has been placed and new air diffusers and related piping installed above the ceilings.

Still to be delivered are central chillers and an air handler for the HVAC system. In the meantime, rental HVAC equipment will both enable technicians to balance flows within the revamped air-handling network and keep building occupants comfortable.

This being August, a few projects on Farnsworth’s list are wrapping up. The new bleachers at the Campus Avenue Field are nearly finished. And the plumbing upgrades in Page Hall are complete. These included not just the replacement of the original 1957 toilets with water-conserving 21st-century models, but the substitution of water-bottle fillers for the porcelain drinking fountains on each floor — which, Farnsworth quips, “came over on the Mayflower.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes queries and comments about current, past, future, and parallel-universe construction at �ֲ���ý. Write to dhubley@bates.edu, putting “Campus Construction” or “While the autoclave is delayed, couldn’t they clave manually?” in the subject line.

On June 20, the Dana Hall renovation at �ֲ���ý passed its inspection by the city of Lewiston, thereby earning the college a certificate of occupancy for Dana.

The next administrative hurdle to hop, as we reported previously, is so-called substantial completion, meaning that construction management firm Consigli has satisfied the contractual definition of a done deal and the college can again be the boss of the building.

“As you can see walking through, we’re still a little ways from that,” says Chris Streifel, �ֲ���ý project manager for Dana. But most of the outstanding work falls into the broad categories of final corrections and technological testing.

Construction workers return to Dana Hall after a break. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The new abundance of glass and open sightlines in Dana Hall helps bring the outside in. Shown is a writeup room on the second floor. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A clear plastic membrane protects new carpeting in a second-floor Dana Hall classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Subcontractors’ vehicles parked on Alumni Walk near Dana. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Bare steam-supply pipes that we showed you the other month are now encased in white insulation. The location is the Dana Hall basement where feed lines from the campus-wide steam loop enter. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A fire-suppression system valve in a freshly painted Dana Hall stairway. The green reflection comes from an accent wall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The installation of lab equipment is still in progress in Dana 119. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Fume-hood controls in a first-floor lab. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Balloons are taped onto nozzles in a fume hood to help detect any leaks in the hood’s gas, air, and vacuum supplies. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A partially painted second-floor restroom corridor. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The view from a third-floor writeup room in Dana Hall. The color scheme and the ample use of glass are hallmarks of architectural firm and Dana renovation designer Payette. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A Dana Hall electronics lab. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall seen from Alumni Walk on July 6, 2022. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A new window will give students using this Dana Hall lounge a striking view all the way to Commons. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

“With a couple more weeks, we should have a very different look in most of the rooms,” Streifel continues. By late July, substantial completion grows close, although Consigli will continue to have a role at Dana for some time thereafter. In the meantime, �ֲ���ý can move equipment and supplies into finished spaces. Substantial completion isn’t absolutely necessary until, as Streifel says, “we start bringing in people” later this summer. 

Approaching the former Dana Chemistry Hall from the Historic Quad last week, we were struck by how normal it all looks — surrounded by lush grass and trees and showing no visible signs of a construction project, other than the two literal signs at the entrance proclaiming Consigli’s presence and forbidding smoking.

The Alumni Walk side was a different story. Placed around the entrance were a table saw, a lot of cut wood, some dismounted doors, and a lawn mower. Subcontractor vans and trucks lined the walkway. Among the firms represented were Firesafe Equipment, Mechanical Services Inc., Minuteman Security Technologies, and Tekon Technical Consultants.

Tekon, of Portsmouth, N.H., is undertaking the complex task of testing and balancing flows of air and of water within the building’s HVAC system. (Rather than being sprayed directly onto building occupants periodically to warm or cool them, the water has a covert role, as it’s used to warm or cool circulating air. We have tried both the direct and the covert methods and can confirm that the latter is much neater and less likely to be misunderstood.) 

On the water side, the testing and balancing experts are “making sure that they’re getting proper gallons per minute at all the different devices that use it to condition the air locally,” Streifel explains. “From an air perspective, they’re looking to confirm they’re getting the flows that were calculated for each location where there’s a diffuser” — the device that actually pumps conditioned air into a space.

The goal is to balance air pressures so the overall HVAC system can maintain a flow throughout the building. “If you just open everything up wide, the very far end won’t get enough air and you’ll get too much out of the front end,” Streifel continues. The proper balance “allows you to get flow consistently where you want it through the whole train of the ductwork.” 

Mechanical engineers calculate those correct pressures in the building-design process.

There is still primary work to do in Dana — applying some surface treatments and other decorative elements, placing lab furniture and other casework, completing a few installations in the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing realms (aka MEP). But the Tekon presence is typical of the main thrust of progress these days: closing-out processes like firing up and testing equipment, performing punch-list inspections and making the resultant tweaks, and clearing out tools and supplies.

Offices were punch-listed starting the first week of July. Classrooms come next, then the teaching labs, and finally, toward the end of July, mechanical and utility areas. MEP testing, including the phase of whole-system tests known as commissioning, will continue throughout. And movable furniture, as opposed to stationary furnishings like lab benches, will start to show up this month.

If Dana is, by and large, on schedule, Streifel notes that crimps in various supply chains are causing a bit of heartburn. “As we’ve tried to close things out, we’ve had a little trouble getting some of the final marker boards [that we need], for example. A few cabinetry pieces here and there. So that’s holding up some things in some locations.”

“There’s a little bit of forest-for-the-trees going on,” Streifel adds. Along with physical things like marker boards and cabinet fittings, definitive information can also show up late. Even Consigli has to rely on its subcontractors for updates, and the subs are waiting to hear from their vendors.

“It’s just this chain of information that sometimes takes a little while to really catch up with the truth. We’ll know more over the next couple of weeks what really is a problem and what isn’t.”

“Constant evolution”: With most of its entrances closed, and one of them partially demolished, how does a person get into Chase Hall these days?

Well, not to be snooty, but most persons don’t. Only at the start of the 2023 academic year, when Chase reopens after a 15-month renovation, will members of the campus and the public be allowed into the building again. Until then, only folks connected with the renovation (or those who, like Campus Construction Update, are irrationally convinced that they’re connected) can get in.

Shown near the former Dining Services loading dock is the shaft and some components of a dumbwaiter that was installed to lift meals upstairs to dining areas, but was also used to lower deliveries to the college store, one flight down. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Demolition debris fills a trash container near the Chase Hall loading dock. At center, members of the Chase Hall renovation team are meeting on the dock. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Watch your step: Chase Hall’s main Campus Avenue entrance, bereft of stairs. The entrance will be rebuilt at ground level. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Now gutted and used to store ventilation ducts that will be discarded, this once was an office on Chase Hall’s second floor. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A new main stairway from the Chase Hall entrance nearest Muskie Archives will touch down at this location near the old Dining Services loading dock. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Once the use of student post-office boxes kept this spot on Chase Hall’s ground floor busy. But it’s now a place to park equipment and supplies as hazardous waste abatement takes place behind the wall and poly sheeting. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This view, from the once and future reception area for the Office of Intercultural Education, shows where a new stairway will provide much-improved access to the OIE. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The �ֲ���ý Musicians Union rehearsal space in Chase Hall has lost some of its walls to make way for a new stairway and elevator, but the facility will be rebuilt. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

For us, last week, entry was over the loading dock and through what, until 2008, was the service entrance to Dining Services. Kristi Mynhier, the �ֲ���ý project manager for Chase, led us from the dock through the former receiving area, which has been stripped down to the bare wall masonry.

Just a short distance inside we paused to ponder a space where, in the coming months, a brand-new major stairway will touch down. This area will look pretty sharp when that’s done, but at the moment its close resemblance to a dungeon is spoiled only by traces of now-removed facilities, including a dumbwaiter that was used into the 2000s to hoist meals upstairs and College Store deliveries downstairs.

Next we descended to what used to be the College Store and into the lower lobby, where the old mailboxes still stand, crossed out with big spray-paint X’s. The Little Room, past and future site of student gatherings, is largely untouched. But its original entrance and the nearby landing for a different main stairway — the one adjacent to the P.O. boxes and original to the building — are enclosed in plastic sheeting.

This, a roaring air pump, and a “Danger” sign flapping on the poly sheeting were our clues that haz-mat abatement specialists from Acadia Contractors were at work inside.

Having spent the early summer tearing out asbestos-bearing materials on the second floor, Acadia is now doing likewise with both that old staircase, which once led from the mailboxes and College Store up to Campus Avenue, and much of the southwest corner of Chase’s first floor.

Abatement here will go on till around the third week of July. That will be followed by structural demolition and then the construction of a new and improved stairway connecting the building’s three main levels (street access will be lowered to ground level). Acadia, meanwhile, will return to the second floor to take on additional abatement as decorative but hazmat-bearing (isn’t that always the way?) arches in a main hallway are prepared for removal. 

Mynhier took us up to the first level at a point where poly walls form a corner. Behind the plastic to one side is Chase Hall Lounge, which looks a lot like its old self, but in place of the contradancers and students playing billiards, we saw staffers from Consigli Construction, the firm overseeing construction in Chase. The corner’s other wall extends all the way to the door facing the courtyard that Chase and Carnegie share. 

We climbed another half-level into Memorial Commons, which won’t be involved in the renovation, and into back corridors where, until last spring, student musicians and others pursued various projects. Demolition of partition walls has opened this area wide, and that’s to clear space for that new main stairway.

A landing here will also accommodate a new elevator, and this will provide, for the first time, convenient access to the Office of Intercultural Education. The �ֲ���ý Musicians Union will return to reconstructed quarters in this vicinity.

Ending the tour, a back stairway we’d never seen deposited us on the second floor. Like the old Dining Services and College Store spaces, this too has been extensively gutted, but here the effect was even more dramatic, as enough wall structure remained to delineate the old floor plan.

In fact, the old walls had concealed surprises that changed the project team’s plans for this corridor, which most recently housed student-affairs offices. One such was that there were more layers of wall lining the corridor than the old plans indicated: In addition to the outermost layer, of modern wallboard, there was also old plaster-lath. (Proving once again that yesterday’s builders do often get the last lath.) 

This discovery means that in the interest of cost and expediency, the whole wall surface will have to be ripped out to make utility installations, instead of selectively slotting and then patching the wallboard.

Similarly, the removal of other walls along the corridor revealed load-bearing elements, both columns and a wall, that don’t appear on original plans. This necessitates a change in floor plan and adjustments to furniture purchases. But at least there won’t be any net loss of usable square footage.

“It’s part of the constant evolution of a renovation,” Mynhier says. “The entire project will go like this, where we’ll just find unforeseen conditions and have to pivot.”

Finally at Chase, we were interested to see that in anticipation of two new exterior entrances, a new trench has exposed most of the building’s foundation along Campus Avenue. White insulating foam and black fabric waterproofing have been applied to the foundation wall, and some gravel has been placed in the trench to enhance drainage, with more to come. 

Not a lotta terracotta: The race to finish renovating the Russell Street Track is taking a brief breather as general contractor Miller Sports Construction of West Chester, Pa., awaits the delivery of the track and field facility’s new surface.

Originally scheduled to arrive this week or next, the many rolls of Mondo Sportflex Super X 720 surface are now expected by July 26. Installation will commence immediately, notes Paul Farnsworth, the �ֲ���ý Facility Services project manager running the renovation.

Farnsworth explains that the manufacturer of the surface, the Italian company Mondo, encountered delays first in obtaining the pigment needed for �ֲ���ý’ choice of color — terracotta — and then in getting the many pallets of Sportflex onto a ship.

But now that vessel is en route to Montreal for unloading. “They don’t expect any issues at Montreal or trucking it here,” he says.

At the track itself, not much has happened since our last report. It’s no disparagement to say that it’s been about as interesting as watching asphalt cure, because, in fact, that’s what’s been happening. Oh, and a crew from Miller Sports did stop by on the 10th to flood the new coat of asphalt as a way of detecting low spots, which were outlined with spray paint and will be leveled prior to the Mondo application.

The only variable thereafter is weather, Farnsworth adds. But if there’s any silver lining to this summer’s worrisome lack of rain clouds, it’s the lack of rain-related construction delays.

Also on the athletics front, Farnsworth notes that the new bleachers at the Campus Avenue Field — the facility’s first permanent grandstand — are being erected this week. Finished by the end of June was the other major piece of that project, a new, accessible walkway from the field past John Bertram Hall and down to the intersection of Campus and Central avenues.

As noted previously, Farnsworth is overseeing work at the Olin Arts Center concerning heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning — HVAC. That multifaceted project is on schedule, with the original HVAC plant gone and two of three new air handlers being assembled. The third, assuming that no terracotta pigment will be needed, is due next week. 

One air handler will serve the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art, another the Olin concert hall and classrooms below it, and the third, the remainder of the building — classrooms, offices, practice rooms for musicians, and art studios for artists.

Meanwhile, HVAC experts have finished installing 76 variable air volume units, or VAVs. These are the diffusers that actually regulate the room-by-room flow of conditioned air throughout the building.

The project has also entailed the placement of new insulation, a spray foam, into the walls of the art museum, which has necessitated removing and replacing sections of interior wallboard.

Zachau Construction of Freeport, Maine, is the general contractor for the Olin work.

Nearby, on College Street, plumbing rough-ins have been completed prior to replacing 16 toilets in Page Hall. The old johns were original to the 1957 building. At the same time, PVC pipe is supplanting much of the original cast iron piping, which is so brittle, even when new, that the tool used to cut it simply garrotes the pipe with a tight chain. 

The new toilets, in six restrooms, will go in following wall tiling and a city inspection.

Finally, with Chris Streifel as project manager, Facility Services has rebuilt the three distinctively pointy bay windows on the front of Hopkins House. After 30 years of existence, they’d gotten leaky. It was a pilot project: Similar windows on the other two Residential Village dorms, Moody and Rzasa, will be rehabbed next year. 

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “It’s a lath a minute with you, isn’t it?” in the subject line.

“Summertime
Demolition ain’t easy
Hammers thumpin’
And the sawin’ is nigh”

All right, so the search will go on for Campus Construction Update’s summer theme song (and our apologies go out to fans of DuBose Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin).

Nevertheless, summer remains peak season for construction at �ֲ���ý, thanks to (mostly) agreeable weather and a smaller campus population. So here’s a roundup of summer 2022 construction news, including:

• a major renovation nearing completion, that being Dana Hall’s;
• a major renovation in its early days, at Chase Hall;
• refurbishment of a key athletics facility, the Russell Street Track; and more.

True to their code: If all goes according to plan, Lewiston city officials will inspect Dana Hall on June 20 as a prerequisite to issuing to �ֲ���ý a certificate of occupancy.

A major milestone en route to the late summer reopening of Dana after an in-depth renovation, the inspection and certification are a process “that we’re always anxious about and hopeful it will go smoothly,” says Chris Streifel, �ֲ���ý project manager for the Dana project. “There’s a lot to it.”

The inspection will emphasize conditions relating to life safety, accessibility, and compliance with building codes — things like functioning doors and elevator, unobstructed egresses and walkways, operational lighting, sanitation, and ventilation systems, and so on.

“We need to have primary finishes completed as well,” Streifel adds. “There can’t be rough construction still to do. So flooring should be down and walls painted.”

Michael Carpentier is the Dana project superintendent for Consigli Construction, the firm managing the project for �ֲ���ý, and he will accompany the city building inspector and fire department officials during their visit.

Newly installed lab benches in Dana Hall Room 119 on June 6, 2022. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A third-floor bio lab in Dana Hall. The boxes projecting from the floor show where lab benches will be set: The boxes carry utility connections to the benches. The shiny wall surfaces can be written on. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Lab benches and other casework are stockpiled in a classroom on Dana Hall’s second floor awaiting installation. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall on June 6, 2022. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This interior window affords views into the first-floor chemistry preparation area in Dana Hall. The tape, of course, is to call attention to the glass while work in the building continues. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A doorway from Dana Hall’s first-floor lobby, at Alumni Walk, into the main part of the building. The use of plenty of glass and the bright green accent paint are two visual motifs that Dana shares with the Bonney Science Center. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A painter at work in a Dana hallway. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This panel in Dana Hall’s attic contains controls for local HVAC units serving each room in the building. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Sprouting a mind-bending array of steam, water, and control connections, Dana Hall’s main air handler was among systems recently test-started. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Local sitework firm Gendron & Gendron renewed the landscaping around Dana Hall. Shown are new shrubs, flowers, and grass around the brickwalled HVAC chiller, also new. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The full-size, view-blocking construction site fence around Dana Hall has been replaced with a lightweight plastic barrier, seen at left, to protect the newly seeded grass. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Streifel says, “I’m confident that we’re going to be where we need to be” in terms of renovation progress by the 20th. “There’s a lot left to do, there’s no doubt about it. But there isn’t anything that appears to be throwing us off that objective. It’s a reasonable objective.”

Another milestone will likely appear soon after the occupancy certificate is issued: a formal declaration of substantial completion, which “could come as little as a week later,” says Streifel.

Substantial completion means that a project has met the objectives stipulated in the contract between construction manager and client. And it means that the legal ownership of the building in question reverts from the construction manager to its nominal owner — that being �ֲ���ý.

Next, the college will spend a couple weeks moving furniture and supplies into the 57-year-old Dana, a former chemistry facility now repurposed for introductory science education. The renovation will also serve to expand the college’s roster of general-purpose classrooms.

After a busy July getting the building squared away, Dana staff will occupy their offices starting Aug. 8. And a few weeks later Dana will reopen for classes along with the rest of campus.

Previously: Enough of looking to the future, as Campus Construction Update relapses into our preferred mindset of dwelling on (or in) the past — Dana’s recent past, at any rate. Since mid-May, various building systems have been test-started: the main air handler, HVAC water chillers, some of the variable frequency drives that operate pumps and fans for local temperature control. And Dana has been looped into the campus-wide steam system, which will heat water that heats interior air.

At the same time, Streifel says, the formal systems-testing protocol known as commissioning is in progress, albeit in an early phase that entails compiling documentation and ensuring that all the gizmos, contraptions, and whatchamacallits are properly placed and connected.

Thus far, “the commissioning agent’s been involved,” Streifel says. “We’ve had several commissioning meetings so far. But the real nitty-gritty is still to come,” that being the actual shaking-down of systems ranging from HVAC to data to building controls. “Late June and all of July will be heavy in commissioning” (and to account for changing seasons, some commissioning will likely go on well past July).

Similarly, though punch-listing has been in progress for weeks, it will soon expand from above-ceiling mechanical and electrical fixtures to, well, everything that’s ready for inspection.

Among the three teaching floors, the first remains closest to completion. Most of the casework — lab benches, cabinets, etc. — is in place in the laboratories. Flooring is about done, ceiling grids and many tiles are in place, top coats of paint abound, a lot of glass is mounted, and some doors are hung.

“I’d say the third floor looks the least finished,” says Streifel. “But even wandering through the second floor, we’re getting to the point where we’re seeing, ‘Oh, there’s one thing left to do there, one thing left to do there, one thing left to do there’ — but we can see the end result.”

Next step: no steps: Just a couple of weeks after the view-blocking fence was removed from the Dana Hall construction site, the same kind of fence (or even the same fence!) has been erected elsewhere for Campus Construction Update to peep over.

The new barrier encloses Chase Hall, and it came along as an ambitious revamp of the century-old building has shifted to a higher gear. As we reported in March, the goal of the 15-month makeover is to bolster Chase’s original role as a student center — and the means to that end include dramatic improvements to building accessibility and wayfinding, the enhancement of student-bookable spaces, and the clustering of key Student Affairs offices.

We arrived at Chase on Monday morning just in time to watch an excavator-mounted jackhammer obliterate the stairs at the main Campus Avenue entrance. (This was the first step, no pun intended, toward rebuilding the entrance at ground level.) It gave us a pang to watch the concrete crumble, as those stairs had always seemed like a special �ֲ���ý place: students waiting for the intercity bus or the Bobcat Express shuttle, folks with Chase business passing in and out, yours truly eating M&M Peanuts and staring at new construction across the avenue.

Inside Chase on Monday, an Acadia Contractors team was nearly done with a monthlong process of asbestos abatement on what the project team is calling the second floor. (Chase has something like nine levels, so we’ll just roll with it.)

Soon that team will move down one story, tape up their protective plastic sheets, and resume asbestos removal, primarily from areas of plaster-lath ceiling where new utility runs will go. They’ll concentrate on what used to be first-floor lobby and office space — you’ve probably been there — adjacent to that main Campus Avenue entrance.

Setting up a construction site fence at Chase Hall on June 6, 2022. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A site fence being set up around the Chase Hall construction zone on June 6. Jersey barriers are used as bases for the fence where vehicular traffic is present. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Walls have been stripped, temporary lights and electrical service run in, and some ceiling tiles removed in preparation for extensive demolition in Chase Hall’s former main lobby. The door at left leads to Campus Avenue. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A new grand stairway will terminate in this approximate location in the basement of Chase Hall. The College Store formerly had office and stockroom space here. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Formerly the reception area for the Office of Intercultural Education, this space will open onto the upper end of a new master stairway in Chase Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Pipes, conduits, and other demolition debris lies in a heap in the former site of the College Store in Chase Hall. Through the glass at right are long-disused student mailboxes. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Supplies and tools have been staged into Chase Lounge as the the building’s renovation gets into gear. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Chase Hall’s front steps were no match for a pneumatic hammer. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Workers for Gendron & Gendron board up Chase Hall’s main entrance on Campus Aveue prior to the demolition of its concrete stairs. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Meanwhile, upstairs where Acadia had just finished, workers for PBC Environmental of Kittery, Maine, will demolish walls and eventually a section of floor. Formerly the location of offices for Residence Life and other staff, this area will become the upper terminus of a new master stairway.

Soon thereafter, explains �ֲ���ý project manager Kristi Mynhier, “we’ll mobilize the framers so they can put the new wall layout in place, and the mechanical and electrical trades can come through with their rough-ins.”

Rather than executing the interior demolition on a broad front, Mynhier adds, PBC will take it one section at a time. “When you deal with structural demo, there’s always that little bit of the unknown, the need to go slow and be careful,” she says.

Track changes: After 20-plus years of service, the running surface on the Russell Street Track is being replaced this summer.

Like the previous surface, which was scraped up last month, the replacement is a product of Mondo, an Italian firm globally prominent in products for track and field facilities, among other realms. Arriving in July, the new topping is called Sportflex Super X 720.

Among related improvements to the track and field complex: the maximum depth of the steeplechase water jump has been reduced from 70 centimeters to 50, in accordance with new NCAA rules; in-ground fittings for new seasonal soccer ball-stop nets have been installed; and the complex now has a flagpole, a 30-footer erected by Lewiston’s own Neokraft Signs Inc.

The new Mondo track surface will consist of two layers. On top is Sportsflex Super X, selected for its elasticity and spike resistance — “imitated but never duplicated,” according to the manufacturer. (Just like Campus Construction Update!) The bottom layer consists of a matrix of air cells that provide athletes with nice bounce and shock absorption.

The old surface was original to the Russell Street complex, opened in 2001 as a replacement for the Garcelon Field track. The Mondo’s time was up, between exposure to the elements and simple wear and tear from all that running and jumping, as well as noontime walking by fitness-conscious �ֲ���ý folks.

Miller Sports Construction of West Chester, Pa., is redoing the track for �ֲ���ý. The work began in late April with the removal of the old Mondo. Under that was asphalt, and the top inch and a half, aka the wearing course was milled off next. The remaining base layer and the supporting substrate are all holding up well — as project manager Paul Farnsworth points out, a survey of the track early in this project showed that the substrate had pretty much retained the grades created during the original construction.

A new wearing course was laid this week. After 30 days of asphalt curing, more or less, it’s the Mondo’s turn (not to be confused with the soap opera As the World Turns, or the novel As the Earth Turns by Gladys Hasty Carroll, Class of 1925).

The rubbery surface comes in rolls. “It’s glued down, just like flooring,” Farnsworth explains. “So there’s a guy with a trowel that spreads the adhesive, and they roll out a section and straighten it up” or stretch it to fit the curves.

Wait a minute. One person on his knees with a hand tool spreading glue for 67,000 square feet of Mondo?

Yep. Farnsworth’s own response to this startling revelation was, “He must have a Popeye right arm.”

Then, prior to striping, the glue (to say nothing of that right arm) has to cure.

And that’s not all! Farnsworth’s workload at �ֲ���ý these days is typical for a Facility Services project manager in the summer. In addition to the track, he’s also overseeing the complete replacement of the HVAC system in the Olin Arts Center. While the new system will, naturally, be more efficient than the 36-year-old machinery it replaces, driving the project is the need for better humidity and temperature control in the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art, housed in Olin.

Additional energy savings will come with the addition of a so-called dry cooler, which takes advantage of cold temperatures outside to produce chilled water to help regulate temperatures inside without having to run mechanical refrigeration.

The project also entails installation of new wall insulation in the museum. During the construction, temporary climate control systems will support the museum’s stored art collection and the concert hall. The latter system is necessitated by this summer’s resumption at �ֲ���ý of Gordon Research Conferences after a two-year pandemic hiatus.

Rigging the temporary HVAC in the concert hall has meant getting into ductwork above the ceiling, which in turn has meant the erection of substantial staging. “We are scrambling, working weekends, to get the work done and the staging gone before Gordon shows up,” says Farnsworth. �ֲ���ý will this summer spanning June 25–Aug. 12.

Finally, back in the sporting sphere, Farnsworth is tending to the installation of permanent bleachers, seating up to 244, at the Campus Avenue Field. The firm A+ Athletics of Rollinsford, N.H., is doing the installation. Also in progress is the rebuilding of a pathway, newly ADA-compliant, from the corner of Central and Campus avenues to the grandstand.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “Summer Construction at �ֲ���ý: The Musical!” in the subject line.

While the term “fume hood” itself doesn’t quite qualify as poetic, it’s nevertheless true that the recent installation of 18 such devices in Dana Hall sends uplifting messages about that building’s renovation.

For one thing, along with much less-sophisticated features like bookshelves, projection screens, and coat hooks, the hoods are built-in furnishings that can be installed only when most other work in a given space is done. So their arrival signals the beginning of the end of the Dana project, whose construction commenced last July.

And because hoods are scientific tools — ventilated chemistry workstations that protect users from harmful fumes — that beginning-of-end signal is particularly fitting for the latest milestone in the makeover of �ֲ���ý’ science-teaching facilities.

A newly installed fume hood in a teaching lab. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Operating controls on a new Dana Hall fume hood. Note the “Erlab” emblem on the black power panel at upper center. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The Dana Hall worksite from Gate A, near Hedge Hall, on a May morning. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Blue room: A temporary cover protecting new flooring casts blue light in a third-floor Dana Hall classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

As shown in Dana Hall’s first-floor lobby, the architects at Payette selected “wash” lighting fixtures to accentuate textural contrasts among wall sections of different vintages. Note the fume hood at right awaiting installation. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Warm welcome: This system heats outdoor air as it enters the big HVAC unit in Dana Hall’s attic. The objective is to keep cold air from freezing the machinery. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

New fume hoods in Dana 119. The hood unit second from left is for dispensing and disposing of chemicals. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Pipefitters connect Dana Hall’s new chiller, the gray item to the right of center, to the building’s interior HVAC network. The man at right is drilling holes in brick. The excavator behind the chiller well is contouring soil for landscaping. Coram Library is in the background. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

In addition, the new hoods represent an especially �ֲ���ý-ish kind of thrift, involving substantial savings in both initial and operating costs. Traditional fume hoods vent to the outdoors, so operating them entails circulating air into and out of the building, and matching its temperature to interior conditions. To be clear, this air circulation and conditioning effort is in addition to a building’s normal air handling capacity. That added effort requires a lot of infrastructure to buy and maintain, and a lot of electricity to operate.

But the new Dana hoods, instead, are actually ductless. Instead of piping fumes out of the building, they use replaceable charcoal filters to scrub the fumage, so the cleaned air stays in the lab. Made in close consultation with �ֲ���ý by Erlab Inc., an international firm with U.S. headquarters in Massachusetts, these GreenFumeHood 3 filters are simpler, cheaper, and better for the planet than conventional hoods. In fact, a study undertaken by BR+A Consulting Engineers (whom �ֲ���ý hires for quality-control work on its building projects) indicated that with Erlab-equipped ductless hoods, the 20-year operational carbon footprint is 94 percent less than that from ducted hoods.

“They’re going to be cool,” says �ֲ���ý project manager Chris Streifel, not just meaning the air temperature. (The hoods themselves are made by Labconco Corp. of Missouri.)

Still, Streifel points out that the filtered hoods are “not a universal application. They’re not made for every single chemical and they’re not made for every single use.” The 18 hoods in Dana are installed in labs designed for introductory science instruction — in chemistry (eight in each of two labs on the first floor) and in biology (one in each of two labs on the third floor). The technology is almost new to �ֲ���ý — one filtered hood was installed in Carnegie Science Hall last year.

In contrast, across campus in the new Bonney Science Center, a much wider range and intensity of chemistry and biology work takes place, so ducted fume hoods are needed. (And Dana also houses two traditional hoods used specifically for dispensing and disposing of chemicals.)

Also in HVAC world (and pardon us if that’s the name of an annual convention somewhere), the building’s new chiller was placed in its well, on Dana’s outside wall facing Hedge Hall, right on schedule. We happened past on Monday morning, when workers were drilling many holes through Dana’s walls for the water connections: Not to be confused with what people do when they watch Netflix, what the chiller chills is a water-glycol blend that helps control the air temperature inside Dana.

Another to-do list item soon to be checked off is the return to service of Dana’s elevator. The car, controls, and most mechanical components have been replaced, leaving just the hydraulic piston and platform as original components. “From an operating standpoint and a maintenance standpoint, it’s almost a new elevator,” says Streifel. “It’s still rather diminutive, as it always has been, but it’ll have much more of a modern feel and touch.”

Broadly speaking, in fact, the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing installations inside Dana are nearly at the point where the first phase of MEP quality control, aka startup, can begin. That involves all manner of equipment, but notably, Streifel reports, testing of the building’s IT network will likely begin next week. “That will then enable the building management system to start talking to its equipment. And as that comes on, the latter part of May will be very busy.”

As we’ve explained before (and will keep explaining until we’ve mastered it for small talk at parties), startup is not the same as commissioning, which is a more rigorous, formal, and definitive process of systems testing overseen by a hired commissioning agent.

“Startup is something that the contractor owes us, usually with the support of an equipment manufacturer,” Streifel says. “But the commissioning agent will often be present for that, especially for some of the bigger pieces of equipment, just to witness it. And maybe learn something, you know, depending on what the system is. But then the commissioning actually takes place after that.”

And where startup is a test of individual components within a system, commissioning looks more at system performance as a whole. “It’s a slightly different perspective.”

With all this talk of startup and commission, you are probably thinking, “But what of the punch-listing, Campus Construction Update?” We too were curious about the status of that very detail-oriented quality-control process —and were surprised to learn that it’s already happening, albeit with a very tight focus.

“Some of the above-ceiling reviews are happening now,” says Streifel, with engineers from BR+A examining MEP installations above the suspended ceiling. “That’s the first place that usually gets punched out so the ceiling tiles itself can go in to finish the room.” (Just being punched out would finish us.)

Above-ceiling MEP installation (not punch-listing) in progress in a third-floor classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Fasteners awaiting use on a new sill at Dana’s chemical storeroom. A subtle sign of progress in the Dana renovation is the appearance of such finish work around what till now had been just rough openings. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

New electronics for the Dana Hall elevator. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

New fixtures in a Dana Hall restroom. The cardboard is to remind construction crewmembers to use the portable facilities outside. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A new window in Dana Hall’s new ground-floor lounge, adjacent to Alumni Walk. The window will provide generous views toward Commons and Garcelon Field. The blue plastic foam is protecting the glass while construction is ongoing. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall’s third-floor lobby. Rest rooms are situated at the left and a student “write-up room” is ahead. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The staging at the Parker Hall end of Dana should go away in a week or so. Most recently, it provided access to the building’s upper floors while metalworkers were installing handrails in the interior stairways. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall’s new HVAC chiller. The blue panels at right are for soundproofing. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

He knows the drill: Preparing holes for pipes that will connect an outdoor chiller to Dana Hall’s HVAC system. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Steam, control, and electrical connections to the main HVAC unit, in Dana’s attic. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Meanwhile, the multivalent effort to finish rooms rolls on: painting, flooring, insulating, installing terminal utility fixtures, placing and mounting casework and lab equipment. Interestingly, one develops an eye for work that’s done but doesn’t look it: for instance, the well-used blue and orange protective covers hiding the brand-new flooring, or the cardboard boxes atop the new toilets reminding workers that porta-potties outside are still the places to go.

Unique to �ֲ���ý: Campus Construction Update hates to admit to getting something wrong. Fortunately, we almost never do (admit it, that is). But we do concede that our interpretation of the facts may sometimes — if very, very, very rarely — go awry.

This is the case with what we’ve casually termed “Payette green,” the distinctive chartreuse used as an accent color in the new Bonney Science Center and the Dana Hall makeover. Payette is the Boston architectural firm that designed both projects, and Campus Construction Update somehow developed (and, sorry to say, expressed) the wrong idea that the firm uses that particular green in projects for many of its clients.

In fact, we learned this week that the color is unique to �ֲ���ý and those two projects. Selected to complement �ֲ���ý’ own signature color, garnet, the green was inspired by the first spring buds of maple tree leaves — “a reminder of nature’s vibrancy through the long autumn and winter months,” according to Geoff Swift, vice president for finance and administration and treasurer.

Its placement as a chromatic accent, moreover, is meant to represent places of motion and transition, such as stairways, portals, and corridors. Most Payette projects include a bright accent color in key locations, Swift says. Just not that particular green.

Finally, the color was chosen through a collaborative process involving stakeholders in the building projects and Payette representatives. As an important participant in those proceedings pointed out, these are buildings “for young people,” as Swift explains, “and the colors should exude the energy and taste of the students that occupy them.”

The thrill of the Chase: With little outward sign, the yearlong reconfiguration of Chase Hall has gotten underway. Acadia Contractors of Turner, Maine, will soon bring hazmat suits, poly sheeting, and warning signs to bear on the critical process of hazardous-materials abatement in the building — notably, the removal of asbestos and lead paint.

Likely to take a couple of months, abatement will focus on the areas to be structurally rebuilt in the Chase makeover. Those include the main lobby, Chase Lounge, Purposeful Work meeting spaces on the first floor, Residence Life offices on the second floor, and spaces around the �ֲ���ý Musicians Union headquarters, Office of Intercultural Education reception, and OIE prayer rooms.

Acadia and construction management firm Consigli Construction are just setting up shop in Chase. “This week is the first time that anyone’s been on site” as the project’s active phase begins, says Kristi Mynhier, �ֲ���ý project manager for Chase. “So this week is really just about becoming familiar with the building, getting everything set up, and making sure that we’re prepared.”

She explains, “The Den is still operational, and Commencement is still a couple weeks away. So from the outside, it won’t look like much is happening until after Commencement.” A permit for the abatement takes effect next week. By the way, some hazmat abatement was performed last summer, notably in the former site of the College Store.

As planned, student organizations and staff from different offices within the purview of Student Affairs have transferred to nearby temporary quarters — temporary as in 15 months — at 96 Campus Ave. (much closer to the Dairy Joy than their previous digs).

In all, 20 �ֲ���ý staff made the move, including folks from Campus Life, Residential Life, and the OIE. The move took about a week and involved 12 truckloads of furniture, supplies, etc.

If you plan to go there, just look for the topiary critter by the front door.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you, except when you have caught us in an error. (But tell us anyway!) Please send questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College (or reminiscences about the Dairy Joy) to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or a rhyme for “fume hood” in the subject line.

The weeks leading up to Commencement have their own extraordinary excitement. It’s an electric current that tickles every campus constituency — seniors and their families, college staff who have befriended the graduates-to-be, and, of course, the faculty who have taught and guided those students for years.

But the run-up to May 29 and Commencement 2022 offers a unique treat that Campus Construction Update would like to take personally: The removal of the construction-site fence that since last July has surrounded Dana Chemistry Hall, now just Dana Hall, while the 57-year-old building has undergone a thorough renovation. 

Since we began construction reporting, eons ago, we have griped about site fences because they block our probing camera and snooping eyes. (A stepladder helps us peep over the fence. We don’t talk about the stilts.)

Payette green is the color of some walls and flooring in and around Dana Hall restrooms. This is the first floor. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The primary entrance to the Dana Hall construction site. The fencing is scheduled for removal the week of May 23. (In nice weather, Campus Construction Update has spent many happy hours in the Adirondack chairs.) (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Coathooks and cubbies for student use are among the built-in furnishings broadly known as casework. Shown is the corridor giving access to second-floor restrooms. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Hello, young louvers: Guarding air intakes for the Dana Hall HVAC system, the louvers at center were installed earlier this month. It was the first time since last summer that those openings had permanent coverings. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

An artist’s pallet: Composition in masonry near the future site of an HVAC water chlller at Dana Hall. Note the 1971 ivy stone to the right of center. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The darker gray contraptions are HVAC exhaust fans newly installed in Dana’s attic. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Green data cables are bundled in a first-floor information technology closet. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Payette, the architectural firm that designed both the new Bonney Science Center and the renovation of Dana Hall, specified a pale gray paint for expanses of ceiling where utilities infrastructure is exposed. The visual effect is a sort of industrial chic. The loose wrapping is insulation around air-supply ducts, and the silvery gizmo is a fire sprinkler — nowadays they’re mounted on hoses so they can be moved for easy access to nearby items needing service. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Steam from the campus central heating plant enters the Dana Hall heating system through the opening in the basement wall at center. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

But now Chris Streifel, project manager for the Dana renovation and the strategic realignment of �ֲ���ý science facilities of which it’s a part, tells us that around May 23, the green fabric and chain-link fence around Dana will go away — to which we say, Huzzah! (Streifel also points out that around that same time, a similar fence will arise around Chase Hall as a major makeover of that building begins. To which we say: Drat! Drat!)

In fact, Streifel notes, the Dana project could reach “substantial completion” — a contractual milestone where project management firm Consigli Construction returns legal control of the building to �ֲ���ý — about a month after the fence goes away. That will begin a race to the finish that includes moving furniture, supplies, and people into Dana in time to reopen the building in time for the new academic year. (The college will also need a certificate of occupancy from the city of Lewiston.) 

With a few notable exceptions, a characteristic of the renovation has been its focus on the building’s interior. But the site fence removal comes as the project team starts giving more love to Dana’s exterior and surroundings. A conspicuous change will be the placement, at the wall facing Hedge Hall, of a chiller to supply cold water that will help regulate air temperatures inside. Starting early this month, masons have made good progress on the chiller foundation and a beauty wall for the installation, and the machine itself should be in place before the end of April.

Gendron & Gendron, a local company familiar to our regular readers, will soon begin a round of site work entailing drainage infrastructure, land contouring, and finally restoration of plantings and other amenities. And a general cleanup of the site will begin on the Historic Quad side of the site — the side facing the college’s Commencement venue — and proceed toward Alumni Walk.

“We expect to have things looking pretty decent for Commencement,” says Streifel. “We’ll have snow fences around to keep people off the freshly seeded lawns, and there may still be some plant-related things to do, but it’ll look a lot more like it normally does.”

So what’s happening inside Dana? The big news is a predicted surge of what the pros call casework: built-in furnishings ranging from lab benches and fume hoods to shelves and student cubbies, some of which have already been installed.

“There’s a pretty substantial casework package in this building,” says Streifel. It’s proportionately smaller than what went into the new Bonney Science Center, because Dana doesn’t have research labs, “but nevertheless there are five teaching labs that have a pretty significant quantity of laboratory case work.” Bedcolab of Laval, Quebec, is providing the lab-specific furnishings.

In terms of overall progress, the third floor is a bit behind the first and second (it will get a trophy anyway, we’ve been assured), and that’s where workers from Roland’s Drywall will be ending their primary contribution to the Dana project as they finish soffits around the ceiling perimeters. The third level is also where most of the remaining utility rough-ins are still being made.

On the second and first levels, meanwhile, all manner of surface treatments have blossomed. Much of the final floor covering has been laid in the first story — medium gray rubber-like tiles for most areas, but restrooms and adjacent corridors are receiving the eye-popping lime-popsicle green that’s a visual signature of Payette, the project design firm for both Dana and Bonney. Textured temporary covers are protecting the new tiles from construction activities.

Suspended power in a first-floor classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

These canisters hold sand that will filter the water supply into Dana Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Ceiling grids have been hung in much of Dana Hall. In this second-floor classroom, taking a break are workers for Roland’s Drywall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

As the Dana Hall renovation nears its end, the site fence is not long for this world. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Shown are two colors of floor tiles awaiting placement in Dana Hall. The Payette-green tiles will be used in and around restrooms, as well as for accents elsewhere. The blue and orange areas are temporary protective coverings atop new tiles. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This rain-blurred photo shows where a chiller for the Dana Hall HVAC system will be placed in the coming weeks. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The suspended ceiling grid in a second-floor classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

One of two main lobbies in Dana Hall, this second-floor space opens onto the Historic Quad. A lobby one level down and at the far end of the building faces Alumni Walk. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Payette green also enlivens wall tiles and paint in and around the restrooms, as well as accents in stairways and elsewhere. But white and pale gray are dominant paint colors, with the latter providing visual unity to dense conglomerations of ceiling pipes and ducts. 

Terminal utility connections — e.g., wall outlets, light fixtures, water faucets — are abounding on the two lower levels. Likewise are suspended ceilings, with most of the metal grids and lots of tiles in place, in particular tiles associated with fittings such as sprinklers or occupancy sensors. Miles of cable — telecom, data, audio-visual, fire response, security — have been pulled into place and terminated, with miles more to come.

Meanwhile, in the attic and basement, the mind-boggling drive to build out building-wide systems goes on. In the fourth-story attic, which is more of a metal jungle than ever, the two HVAC exhaust fans are in place and undergoing connection to their duct and electrical networks. The big primary air handler is sprouting hookups in every direction, including heavy steel pipes that will bring heat from the campus steam plant into the system. Steamfitting in the basement, where campus steam enters the building, and in the attic is largely complete. 

Given this frenzy of engineering, major equipment startups and system-wide tests aren’t too far off. “We’re probably two or three weeks away,” says Streifel. “The big air handler will likely be the first item.”

Overall, “Consigli has got a pretty good game plan going,” he continues. In terms of workers on site, “we’ve been in the range of 60 to 70 persons per day for a while. So it’s pretty busy. Dana has about half the space of Bonney, and that’s a little bit more than half of the people that we had at peak at Bonney.

“So that means there’re a lot of people working in the building and they’re spread out all over the place. You walk into any room and you’re likely to find somebody there or not far away. So it’s moving along quite well in an organized-chaos type of approach.” 

Finally, we told you last month that doors were among construction components made scarcer by COVID-related supply chain delays. Apparently that conga line is once again crossing the ballroom floor, though, because this week’s Dana tour revealed 70 or so new doors stockpiled for installation. 

Streifel allows that the Dana project may indeed — mixed metaphor alert! — be out of the supply-chain woods. By now, “there aren’t too many things that haven’t been ordered already,” he says. “It would be inappropriate for me to say no, we’re all good, but I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes queries and comments about current, past, future, timeless, and “that never happened — or did it?” construction at �ֲ���ý. Write to dhubley@bates.edu, putting “Campus Construction” or “Suspended power? Wire they doing that?” in the subject line.

Doug Hubley is a writer and musician living in Portland, Maine.

Chase Hall at �ֲ���ý College: beloved, iconic, historic.

And user-friendly? Well, probably not — thanks to unwelcoming entrances and a confounding interior layout that involves nine floor levels and multiple additions, all stitched together by a labyrinth of corridors and stairways.

But a plan is now in motion to address these challenges. Late next month, the college will close Chase and begin a substantial renovation involving as much as half of the building’s floor space, as well as a systems upgrade and plenty of cosmetic work. (This will be the sixth addition or substantial renovation in the building’s 102-year history, according to the project announcement.) 

Specifically, the 16-month makeover will:

• Revamp the interior to make Chase a campus hub for most student services;
• Improve accessibility, wayfinding, and circulation, notably through the reconfiguration of building entrances and the installation of new stairways and a third elevator;
• Renew the building’s utilities infrastructure, portions of which haven’t been operable for years;
• And add comfortable, technologically enabled multi-purpose spaces.

Chase will reopen at the start of the 2023–24 academic year. The most conspicuous results of the project will be the two rebuilt entrances on Campus Avenue and one on Franklin Walk, where new floor plans will improve access, both visual and physical, into the building. In a dramatic change, the main entry on the avenue, near the Kenison Gate, will be lowered to ground level.

Currently, a flight of steps there brings you up into the building, where you find yourself enclosed in a stairwell. After the renovation, you’ll enter Chase onto a landing that invites entry deeper into the building — thanks to new sightlines, new stairs, and better exposure for the existing elevator.

A similar interior arrangement is planned for the other end of the building, including the current and future home of the Office of Intercultural Education. This will entail the installation of a new central stairway and elevator. These changes will result in increased visibility for the OIE, a vital campus gathering place.

The building entrance onto Franklin Walk (the extension of Franklin Street that runs between Chase and Muskie Archives) will be landscaped and furnished for al fresco relaxation and equipped with a new ramp that will make the existing loading dock ADA-compliant.

A project goal is to reinvigorate Chase as a student resource that will be busy 24 hours a day. Built as a campus social center, the hall retains that identity, but there was a period when several of its student-focused functions moved elsewhere — Commons in 2008, and Post & Print first to Lane Hall and then, in 2016, to the new Kalperis Hall along with the College Store.

Chase remained busy after dark with student activities, such as events in the former dining hall, and student organizations like the Student newspaper and the Outing Club, but the building became a little too quiet during the day.

“We took a look at the campus to figure out, with all these functions being separated, how could we reinvigorate Chase,” explains Pam Wichroski, �ֲ���ý’ director of capital planning and construction. “That was when we recreated the [current] vision for Chase, which was to have more student-focused programs in the building to make it more active and viable 24 hours.”

�ֲ���ý brought in Boston’s Ann Beha Architects to help reimagine the building’s role. The 2014 relocation of OIE into its popular Chase location provided a spark of inspiration, and a few years back, the college brought in other student services as well — Campus Life, Residential Life and Health Education, and some elements of the Purposeful Work program.

Post-renovation, the Office of Community Standards and the entirety of the Center for Purposeful Work will join the other service offices in Chase. These will occupy the former site of the College Store in the basement and the equivalent area one flight up, near the loading dock.

And Chase, of course, will remain the site for student activities and organizations, which will find new levels of comfort, polish, and technological capability at their disposal.

While Chase is closed for the renovation, most current occupants — student organizations, Campus Life, the OIE, and Residence Life and Health Education — will occupy temporary quarters a couple of blocks away, at 96 Campus Ave. Situated next to the Campus Avenue Field, this modern building belonged to St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center and housed offices and a daycare center until its recent purchase by �ֲ���ý. (The Bobcat Den will be closed during the project, but will reopen in its longtime space thereafter.)

The project architect for the Chase project is Canal 5 Studio — a Portland, Maine, firm whose prior �ֲ���ý experience includes Bobcat Den renovations in 2012, the new OIE offices in Chase in 2014, and new Lane Hall quarters for the �ֲ���ý Communications Office in 2018. Consigli Construction, the college’s longtime construction management partner, will handle the Chase project even as it wraps up the Dana Hall renovation this summer.

Starting in June, the Bobcat Express pickup location and the intercity bus stop in front of Chase will be displaced by construction fencing, with new arrangements to be announced. 

Steady progress: Across the Historic Quad from Chase, the renovation of Dana Hall remains in what �ֲ���ý Project Manager Chris Streifel describes as “that routine of just steady progress.” 

“There’s not a lot changing or a lot of drama, really. So that’s good,” says Streifel. “That’s what we want.”

This doesn’t mean that nothing has happened during the nearly two months since we last checked in (although we would like to believe that we’re essential to any construction work on campus).

Quite the opposite. For instance, since last week, Dana Hall has been getting its electricity through a brand-new circuit-breaker panel, which is the size of a refrigerator and lives in the basement. (Which is no place for a refrigerator.) It replaces a unit that measured about 18 by 36 inches and was last seen sitting on the concrete floor awaiting oblivion.

Which leads us to point out that a fair amount of recent progress in Dana is discernible by what’s no longer there. 

This example of a utility rough-in shows outlet boxes mounted on wall studs separating two third-floor Dana Hall classrooms. An electrician works in the background. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Masons are pretty much done with so-called block infill in Dana Hall — that is, using concrete blocks to fill unwanted holes and fill out the borders of new openings. Capped with a new steel lintel, this opening will give students using a new writeup room a view of the third-floor lobby. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A view of Dana Hall’s tidy second-floor lobby, seen from the main entrance near the Historic Quad. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

In Dana Hall’s second-floor lobby, a drill on a section of wall frame awaits its next task. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A carton of actuators for HVAC components — or, to use the technical terms, gizmos that hook up to thingamabobs. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

An electrician pulls cable into a first-floor breaker box, one of several in this corridor. (But do the cables ever pull back?) (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall’s new main electrical panel lives in the basement. It went into service during the week of Feb. 21. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This circuit-breaker panel for Dana’s emergency electricity supply is wearing a lockout-tagout safety system. To protect an electrician working on specific circuits, the breakers with the orange lockouts and the yellow cord can’t be turned on. That electrician, whose name is on the paper tag, has the only key for the padlock on the red gizmo that can release the circuits. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The first thing we noticed during a visit on the last day of February was how tidy Dana’s interior was. There was much less stuff to be seen — fewer ladders, fewer wood fragments and bits of wire insulation on the floor, many fewer pallets loaded with building materials. (There’s nothing like using supplies to get them out of your way.) 

Contributing to this shipshape impression was the way flat surfaces have come along. For starters, there are simply more of them, as wallboard continues to appear on new partition walls. Down on the first floor, there’s even some new paint going onto new walls.

Floors have been leveled and are awaiting their final coverings, which will be placed late in the game to save on wear and tear. 

The masonry work on the brick and concrete-block interior walls has been completed. That is, all the openings for new doors and windows have been cut and finished, and all the unwanted old openings have been filled. So the masons have gone, taking with them their pallets of new blocks and buckets of mortar. 

The exception to this tidying trend is in the attic, where the installation of equipment serving the building’s heating, ventilation, and cooling needs is ramping up. New piping runs all over the place, much of it supported by metal frameworks, and there’s more to come. Engineers have brought in heat exchangers and a variety of pumps, and shiny new sheet-metal ducts cling to the ceiling.

And of course that attic space, which for a brief time last year was open enough for a sock hop, is dominated by the giant HVAC machine, still wrapped in plastic.

In short, says Streifel, the attic will fill up. “It won’t be quite as full as it was before, but it’ll be similar.”

Finally, we’ve learned a little more about COVID-related supply-chain problems that could affect the pace of construction at �ֲ���ý. “What’s been unsaid so far is how well the construction team has navigated supply-chain issues that are very real,” says Streifel, referring to staff at construction management company Consigli and at the project architectural firm Payette, among others.

Getting timely deliveries of glass became problematic even during the building of the Bonney Science Center, which was finished last summer. And a current focus of concern is doors and door components.

Pre-pandemic, says Streifel, one could expect orders for such items to be filled in four to six weeks. Now we’re “seeing more like 12 weeks.” He adds, “One of the things that we were notified about, a week or so ago, is that there’s no longer an expediting process.”

That is, in the case of what you might call a door emergency — say, a replacement is needed in a hurry because a dimension needs to be changed — there’s no longer the option to get products faster by paying more. You just have to wait.

Fortunately, “we’ve avoided what could be some pretty challenging lead times. So I’m confident the team is doing the right things to try to avoid them,” Streifel says — “thinking ahead and making firm decisions at a much earlier time frame than what we’ve traditionally had to do.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “Insert Joke Here” in the subject line. (It’s a meta-joke! Get it?)

If every week brought the kind of excitement sparked up in late November by the hoisting of a large air-handling machine into Dana Hall’s attic, Campus Construction Update would be incapacitated by nervous exhaustion.

But these days, fortunately, the Dana renovation is about steady, soothing overall progress and not show-stopping crane choreography. 

If we want to get all numerical about that progress, �ֲ���ý construction administrator Jacob Kendall estimates that on a typical work day, there are 50 or 60 workers on site representing 10 trades. “There will be a body in every corner” getting something done, he says.

Such as? “It’s all that rough stuff,” says �ֲ���ý project manager Chris Streifel — “rough” in the sense of coarse. “There’s still some work to be done on leveling floors. There’s building [interior] walls, getting them ready and closing them in. There are structural things on the ceilings.”

“That’s how we’ll go for probably another month or so,” by which point it should be easier to get a sense of the future Dana as rooms are partitioned into their final configurations. “There’s a lot of work to do, but it’ll come together pretty quick in a lot of spaces.

“It’s not imminent, but it’s not a year away.”

New utilities installations near Dana’s Alumni Walk entry. The white stuff is insulation covering water pipes and the silvery stuff is insulation on HVAC ducts. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A heavy plastic sheet covers the large opening in Dana Hall’s east gable through which a large air-handling machine was loaded in November. The silver pipe is feeding warm air from a portable heater into the building. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Plastic-protected air ducts and fan-coil units are stored in a Dana Hall classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Dana Hall’s attic, facing Parker Hall. Behind the photographer is the elevator and the new HVAC machine, which takes up a third or half of the attic. Additional air-handling equipment and other utilities — note the two pumps at center right — will occupy the space shown. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The ruddy plywood inserts between the studs in this restroom-to-be are called “blocking.” Because wallboard doesn’t hold screws very well, blocking provides a sturdy backing for attaching features like mirrors or railings. Fireproofing imparts the red tint. Note that some plumbing and electrical wiring — examples of utilities rough-ins — are in place. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Shown in what will be a third-floor write-up room, “Ace” is a smoke eater — a gizmo that removes smoke created by welding. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Pipe hangers on pallets, wall studs on a cart, and HVAC components stockpiled in a third-floor classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A view of Dana 106, which will be a lab for intro chemistry. The gray item at center right is a door frame. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This section of ceiling is divided between two treatments: The left-hand side will be covered with suspended tiles and the right will be left open, with pipes and ducts visible. The fuzzy material at center right is K13, a spray-on acoustic insulation that will also serve as a visual treatment. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

New to Dana’s basement, this expansion tank is part of the mechanism that will use steam from the campus heating plant to warm air for the building. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The first-floor area nearest the camera will house a kitchenette, mailboxes, and a copier. Plumbing will occupy the space at rear. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

And of course there’s always the impressive drive to hang utilities apparatus from ceilings in all five levels of the building. (So, even with the air handler out of sight, an observer still has plenty of looking upward to do.) In fact, there are so many new pipes, conduits, air ducts, etc., destined to crisscross the ceilings that we asked Streifel whether the renovation would leave Dana with substantially more such infrastructure after the renovation than before it.

The answer is an empirical and qualified “yes.” Post renovation, there “probably is a little bit more, just because building systems are more complicated” than they used to be, Streifel says. 

In addition, a major gain is coming with the new HVAC system, which addresses longtime shortcomings in the previous setup. Back in the day, Dana was infamous for its spotty temperature regulation, which was addressed but never quite remedied by upgrades to the original 1965 air handling machinery and the addition of several supplementary systems, some of them serving single labs.

But after the makeover, thanks to the creation of a single, state-of-the-art system, Dana occupants will enjoy “heating and cooling throughout the building consistently, as opposed to pockets of cooling [or warming] here and there,” Streifel says. 

And in addition to the new attic HVAC machine, the latest system will comprise masses of ductwork, water and steam pipes, and overhead fan-coil units that provide zonal temperature control. A tour of the building reveals heaps of such equipment, intakes sealed against dust with attractive blue plastic, awaiting installation.

Reductions in other utilities, though, will somewhat offset all that new overhead HVAC metal. This is driven by a change in the building’s mission: Because research that had taken place in Dana has been moved to the new Bonney Science Center and Dana’s new labs will be oriented more toward introductory instruction (in biology and chemistry), they won’t require the previous density of domestic water supplies, drainage, etc., that was present before. 

Having addressed a defining question of these troubled times — which version of Dana, past or future, has more pipes hanging from the ceilings? — we can now move on to another overhead process, begun in December, that may be a bit more consequential. Steelworkers for the local subcontractor MZ Metal Works are nearly finished installing short girders that on one end are fastened to Dana’s structural steel skeleton, and at the other are bolted into the building’s masonry exterior walls.

Manufactured by American Steel Fabricators of Greenfield, N.H., and sometimes called “clips,” these units improve “the seismic resistance of the building,” Streifel explains — that is, their stability during an earthquake. They impart additional rigidity to the structure and “help keep things in place and straight so they’re providing their maximum load capacity.”

Another ceiling operation that’s just about done is the spraying-on of a material called K13. This provides both sound absorption and a kind of industrial-chic visual effect that makes an open ceiling look pretty good, despite all the pipes and wires (and eventually, laced-together pairs of sneakers) dangling up there. It’s one of the elements used by architectural firm Payette, designer of both the Dana renovation and the new Bonney Center, to provide visual unity between the two buildings.

No delays in virus delivery: Speaking of defining questions of these troubled times — but seriously now — we wondered how the pandemic is affecting workers and the pace of work at Dana. It’s certainly making some workers ill or otherwise keeping them off the job, says Streifel, but the project remains on schedule — thus far. “It’s adding strain. We haven’t gotten to the point where we’ve had to make any adjustments, but it’s a real possibility that we’re monitoring.”

As was the case during Bonney Science Center construction, project management firm Consigli Construction is responsible for safety protocols on the Dana site.

And what about snarls in the supply chain? With construction likely to be complete by early summer, “there are still plenty of opportunities for things to go sideways,” Streifel replies, “but so far, so good.” He adds, “a lot of that has been managed by just being more proactive, ordering things much earlier, answering questions much earlier.”

In fact, the timely Nov. 29 delivery of that giant complex air-handling unit was a Dana success story in the global realm of supply-chain woes. “That’s no small deal,” he says, pointing to the way the semiconductor shortage has gummed up automakers. “That’s where a lot of the long lead times have really started — things that have so many different components, so a lot of different opportunities” for things to go off the rails. (So far, by the way, we haven’t heard about any shortages of chains linked to global supply chain issues. Or maybe, as Gerry Goffin wrote and The Cookies sang, they ain’t the kind that you can see.)

Anyhoo, back to the topic of progress. If the crane acrobatics gave that HVAC unit a certain charisma it will never have again (except perhaps in the fond eyes of Campus Construction Update), its delivery and activation, more importantly, will make possible all kinds of progress in the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing installations, and by extension, on most fronts throughout the Dana renovation.

“It allows us to bring all the big ductwork up there, to start wiring up all the power — I think there are nine electrical circuits that connect to the various aspects of that machine,” says Streifel. “And I don’t know how many different pipes in and out.

“All of that can happen because now they have set points” on the air handler that they can connect to. “They could have run them close by before that, and just waited for the machine to be there, but this makes it that much easier.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “A lot of what you write about is really over your head, isn’t it?” in the subject line.

Before dawn on Monday, unseen by most members of the campus community, mechanized forces executed something like a military pincers movement at �ֲ���ý.

Objective: Dana Chemistry Hall.

But this was no invasion. (It’s just that we’ve always wanted to write military history.) Instead, the occasion was the delivery and installation of new HVAC machinery that will heat, ventilate, and air-condition Dana for the foreseeable future. The operation was a major advance in an in-depth transformation of the building that began in July and will continue through next spring.

A hydraulic crane belonging to The Cote Corporation of Auburn approached Dana via Campus Avenue and the service road that crosses the Library Quad. Meanwhile, three flatbed tractor-trailers took the direct route, from College Street down Alumni Walk, where they parked inside the construction-site fence to keep truck activity separate from foot traffic (and skateboarders, cyclists, etc.).

Two flatbeds carried the seven major components of the HVAC machine, aka air handler (including the somewhat miraculous enthalpy wheel that we described last month). The third conveyed the equipment that Cote staff needed to hoist and place the boxy, bare-metal HVAC pieces.

The early start accommodated a few hours of prep for the big lift. The mobile crane, a Grove product sold by Milwaukee’s Manitowoc Co., needed to be leveled and blocked for stability. This was even more important than usual because the crane was sited partially on the slope descending from the Historic Quad to Alumni Walk.

In addition, trucks and individual air-handler parts had to be shifted around so that the parts could be placed into the building in the correct order.

Cote Corp.’s mobile crane was ready for action at Dana Chem early on Nov. 29. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Tight quarters inside the site fence for a tractor-trailer carrying Dana Chem HVAC components. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A Cote Corp. employee is shown on a flatbed bearing components of the Dana Chemistry Hall air handler around 8:30 a.m. Nov. 29. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The enthalpy wheel and its housing sit with other HVAC machinery on a flatbed awaiting loading into Dana Chemistry Hall on Nov. 29. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

�ֲ���ý Project Manager Chris Streifel watches progress three stories down as a Cote Corp. rigging crew prepares to start hoisting HVAC machinery to Dana Chemistry Hall’s attic on Nov. 29. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A crane hoists one part of the new HVAC machine into Dana Chemistry Hall on Nov. 29, 2021. The machine has seven parts that were hoisted into the attic during the day. (H. Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Workers watch as a crane floats an air-handler component (center) toward the attic of Dana Chemistry Hall. (Jacob Kendall/�ֲ���ý College)

A piece of the new HVAC machine nears the opening in the Dana Chemistry Hall attic. (H. Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

At left, a Cote Corp. rigger operates a pair of winches while a colleague keeps an eye on the HVAC component that’s being pulled into the Dana Chemistry Hall attic. (Jacob Kendall/�ֲ���ý College)

A Cote Corp. rigger wields a jack as the HVAC unit’s enthalpy wheel is tugged into the attic of Dana Chemistry Hall. (Jacob Kendall/�ֲ���ý College)

One of the largest components of the Dana Chem HVAC system is winched into the attic around 11:30 on Nov. 29. (Chris Streifel/�ֲ���ý College)

The Dana Chem air handler installation is nearly complete in this image taken around 2 p.m. on Nov. 29. (Jacob Kendall/�ֲ���ý College)

In the jargon of rigging and heavy lifting, it’s called “picking” when a given load is attached to the crane and lifted. So the picking (and hopefully grinning) commenced around 10:30 a.m. and continued into early afternoon.

In addition to Cote and �ֲ���ý personnel, people on the scene came from Warren Mechanical, the Maine firm that will actually assemble the air-handler and get it running; and Consigli Construction, which is managing the Dana project for �ֲ���ý.

The air-handler takes up about half of the attic, east of the elevator shaft. The pieces came in through a big hole facing Hedge Hall that was made even bigger for this operation. (The hole, Dana’s once and future HVAC air intake, will be smallified later.) The installation process, in brief, was that first, the crane would float a given part up to the hole while workers on the ground handled lines to steady the load.

Then riggers would fasten cables to the piece and winch it into place on a frame of steel beams. Metal rods were used as rollers under the HVAC components.

It was a tight fit for a few units, including the one containing the enthalpy wheel, notes �ֲ���ý Project Manager Chris Streifel. “There was just an inch and a half” of clearance for the biggest pieces. One of them rubbed on the ceiling as it came in.

“They had to go to a smaller rod,” he says. “They had three-quarter-inch rods that they were rolling it along on, and they had to go down to three-eighths of an inch just to give themselves that little bit of extra room to clear the ceiling and get it all the way down to the end.”

The load-in was finished by 2 p.m. or so. “Then the next thing will be to start connecting all of the different ducts and pipes and wires and controls, and everything else that goes to it. That’ll be the story the next several months,” Streifel says.

Wallboard placement around the tops of walls has begun. These so-called firetops come first in the wallboarding schedule because, as shown here, utility connections can’t be installed until the tops are in place. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

New water heaters in the basement of Dana Chemistry Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Masonry toothing in progress. Two bricks have been removed from this doorway, forming “tooths” — not teeth. Others have been drilled preparatory to chiseling them out. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

An example of masonry toothing, with new concrete blocks filling out the toothed edge of a newly cut doorway. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

You rung? There’s no shortage of ladders in Dana Chem’s Room 119. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Metal wall studs delineate the new restrooms on Dana’s first floor. With the elevator at the approximate center of the space behind the studs, handicapped facilities will be built to the left and general-use facilities to the right. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Flooring installers touch up a patch of self-leveling compound in a second-story Dana Chem classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Stacked on a pallet in a second-floor classroom and swathed in plastic to keep dust out of their innards, these fan-coil units will make it possible to tailor air temperatures to specific areas in Dana Chem. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Some tooths: On other fronts (once you get started, these military metaphors are hard to avoid), “we’re at that steady-state portion of the job, where things are going to look the same for a while. All the same things happening on all floors,” says Streifel. “There’s a lot of progress, but it’s a little bit hard to see it.”

The second floor remains the exemplar, as work is furthest advanced there. For example, that’s where the hanging of wallboard has begun — albeit just at the tops of metal wall studs thus far. Called “firetops” because their use is embrangled with municipal fire codes, these board sections share space with utility runs and therefore tend to be placed just prior to those runs.

“They like to do them first,” Streifel explains, because it’s easier to cut openings in wallboard for pipes and wires than “to try to fit pieces around them.”

Speaking of things mechanical, electrical, and plumbical — sorry, plumbing-related — we were touring Dana’s ground floor with construction administrator Jacob Kendall when we spotted cryptic markings on the concrete under foot. Kendall explained that the lines, letters, and numbers indicated where MEP fittings would be placed…on the ceiling above.

A self-leveling laser pointer set upright on a floor mark, he said, would light up the spot overhead where the fitting would go. And this speaks to one of the differences between constructing a new building and revamping an existing one.

In a new building, it’s more expedient to place fittings while the floors are being fabricated. And you work from the floor above: That is, if you want to hang a pipe from a second-story ceiling, you initiate that attachment on the third-story floor decking.

In Dana or any other old building, though (not that Dana is just any old building!), it’s just more practical — thanks to the laser pointers — to use the second-floor floor, if you will, as a template for implanting MEP installations into the second-floor ceiling.

More practical, but not more agreeable. “You’ve got to cut the holes, you’ve got to drill everything out of the way, as opposed to just having it cast in place” when a new building’s concrete floor slab is poured. “It’s more time-consuming. It’s more challenging. It’s dirtier,” says Streifel.

“Then there are the nuances of dimensional differences. It gets a little bit harder to be as precise in an older building during renovation just because accuracy is more challenging to maintain. You can look and say, ‘I’ve got 9-foot-6-inch ceilings here,’ but in reality, it varies everywhere.

“You have to make certain assumptions when you’re doing the design and those don’t always hold true. You’ve got to be flexible to be able to adapt to that.”

In both new and old, anyhoo, the process for pinpointing MEP locations is the same, and somewhat amazing. As we’ve written elsewhere, those locations are first determined during the creation of a 3D digital model of the building. Then that model, combined with GPS and wireless communication technology, is used to guide someone in the physical building as they use surveying equipment to find and mark all the MEP points.

Other differences between renovating existing construction and building anew? In certain trades, renovations demand a certain amount of blending new with old, and making it all look new. For instance, a technique called “toothing” is conspicuous among the masonry work in Dana. This is where you bust out alternating blocks around an opening. (The result looks like teeth, but in masonry jargon they are tooths.)

So if you are filling an existing opening, you tooth around the opening so you can fit new blocks into the prevailing masonry pattern. If you’ve cut a new opening, toothing makes it easier to create a clean and consistent edge around it as you cut new blocks to fill the, er, cavities.

“There’s lots of construction [techniques] that involve the same concept as masonry toothing,” Streifel adds. A similar process will apply when the big hole in the Dana attic gable is shrunk and carpenters need to blend new wooden siding in with the old.

You even encounter it when new asphalt is laid next to old. “You don’t just butt them up together,” Streifel says. (That explains a lot about our driveway.) “On the old pavement, you grind it down and make almost a very thin set of stairs so that the new pavement butts and then overlaps and overlaps.

“That creates a joint that’s, first, more waterproof, and second, just stronger.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “Does Homer Simpson know you’re stealing his material?” in the subject line.

Waxing all poetic in late September, Campus Construction Update noted that “the slow pivot from destruction to construction is beginning” in the renovation of Dana Chemistry Hall.

Well, pivot completed! A little more than a month after that post, the dust, disorder, and debris of demolition are just fodder for nostalgia, and new walls are rising inside the 56-year-old building that, when renovations are done next summer, will be known simply as Dana Hall.

The demolition that figured so prominently early on in the project was complete by the second week of October. Also finished is the abatement of hazardous materials. 

Now the project team is devoting all its attention to constructive ends: prepping floors for their final surfaces, which we won’t see for months; erecting partition walls; roughing in myriad utility connections; and commencing the installation of machinery, primarily HVAC, in the building’s fourth-floor attic. 

“RD” stands for Roland’s Drywall Inc., the local firm building new partition walls in Dana. This sunlit scene is a second-floor classroom. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Literally and figuratively, Lakeside Concrete Cutting of Newport, Maine, has done much of the heavy lifting early in the Dana renovation. The firm demolished all the masonry walls rendered superfluous by the building redesign, and continues to remove or reconfigure concrete for utility runs, etc. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Much of the early work on the Dana Chemistry Hall project involved masonry demolition. This third-floor image shows where concrete blocks were removed to widen a doorway. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Staff from Consigli Construction, the firm managing the Dana renovation for �ֲ���ý, assess progress in a third-floor space that will be divided into two biology classrooms. The wall remnant at left is part of a shaft or “chase” containing utility connections. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

An array of new utility connections in the basement, with holes cut in the concrete for many more. The new pipes include black ones for wastewater or storm runoff; copper for domestic water; and blue for used chemical collection. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Under construction is a wall forming two active-learning classrooms on Dana’s second floor. Note the new exhaust duct and electrical conduits along the ceiling. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A telescoping-boom forklift removes scrap steel from the Dana worksite. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

In a visual echo of the Bonney Science Center aesthetic, windows or glass walls will afford transparency to student lounges in Dana Hall. This third-floor image shows the future site of one such lounge, slightly left of center. The photographer was standing in another lounge site at the opposite end of the building. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Shown at center is a new electrical box in Dana’s basement. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This first-floor hallway provides a sense of the “old Dana” and its confined spaces. Offices will be created along the right side and an administrative room at left. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The crane and rigging experts from Cote Corporation of Auburn, Maine, will return to campus for that last category, likely around the end of the month. “It’s a pretty big operation,” says Chris Streifel, �ֲ���ý project manager for Dana. While the attic will accommodate a variety of machines related to temperature and humidity in the building, the dominant unit will be an air handler so big that it will be loaded in piecemeal.

The largest component will contain an intriguing gizmo called an enthalpy wheel or energy recovery wheel. Both exhaust air from the building and fresh air from the outdoors pass through the wheel as it spins, and the wheel contains substances that capture heat energy and moisture and transfer them between the airflows.

Such transfers reduce the treatment required for incoming air, thereby lightening the HVAC system’s workload. (As with the Bonney Science Center, the air in Dana will be continuously replaced.) So in summer, the wheel cools and dries incoming air, transferring heat and moisture to the exhaust. In winter, it applies heat and moisture from the exhaust to cold, dry incoming air.

Pretty neat.

To get the air handler into the building, an existing opening (once and future site of a ventilation louver) that faces Hedge Hall will be embiggened. Yet, Streifel notes, “it’s going to be a very tight fit, even then.”

With that operation still weeks away, other chores in the attic are moving apace. Several parallel ribs in the new concrete floor will support the big HVAC unit. The old stainless steel exhaust stacks — a signature feature of the building’s earlier profile — have been removed. And much new wallboard has been hung, again dividing up a space that for a few weeks would have made a great dance hall.

What about the building’s three public levels? The floor prep is nearly done throughout the building, says Streifel. That prep, as we’ve reported previously, culminates in the placement of a cementitious self-leveling compound in a layer about half an inch thick.

Preparation for the preparation, if you will, consists of grinding the old concrete slab more or less smooth, and sealing it with an epoxy mixture. (Some spots, such as former restroom locations and other concentrations of plumbing, have holes right through the old slab that have needed filling.)

In terms of all procedures, the second floor — that’s where you enter from the Historic Quad — is the furthest along. So there, for instance, most wall studs are in place, affording an outline of the completed layout. 

The third floor was the last to undergo demolition, so is bringing up the rear. And the first-floor footprint is about a third larger than the second and third, thanks to the single-story section adjacent to Alumni Walk, so there’s been more to do.

Throughout Dana, mechanical-electrical-plumbing work is going strong. “They’re hanging stuff all over the place,” Streifel says. “Ductwork, electrical conduits, piping, fire protection — all of that is underway, particularly in the basement and first floors, but all floors, really.”

Looking ahead, he adds, “we’re going to go from starting walls to talking about finishes in a few months. By March and April, we’ll be talking about turning systems on, as opposed to a couple years,” as was the case with the much bigger, built-from-scratch Bonney Science Center. 

“I would expect that we’ll be going through punch-listing and commissioning in June and July. There’s a little bit of time in July to tidy things up, finish up punch-listing, and get new furniture in. We’ll move in during August — relatively speaking, a much easier move than what we just went through” with Bonney. (Not least because so much stuff was moved from Dana to Bonney.)

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and reminiscences about construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “Would more personal enthalpy make me more popular?” in the subject line.

The goals of a construction project tend to be functional.

They’re often aesthetic, too — sometimes with poorer outcomes, but often with happy ones when, like �ֲ���ý, you plan and invest your resources thoughtfully.

Of course, construction projects create changes in myriad dimensions beyond those two. And Campus Construction Update is interested in all the ways a construction project may participate in its surroundings. But one that we find especially intriguing is also, because it’s so subjective, one of the least practical and most difficult to address: the effects on remembrance and sense of place.

The object of a yearlong major renovation, Dana Chemistry Hall is shown from Alumni Walk on a brilliant late-September morning. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A view toward Hedge Hall from the Dana attic. Staging is in place for utility rough-ins. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Note the trenches for subfloor utilities in this former mechanical space on the first floor of Dana Chemistry Hall. This area will eventually be divided between a kitchenette/office and mechanical space. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Formerly a secure area for storing chemicals, this room will become a student lounge and tutoring area. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This second-story space in Dana will become an active-learning classroom, one of three on that floor. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

These hangers in the Dana Hall basement will support new overhead pipes, ducts, conduits, etc. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Formerly a lab, this expanse on Dana’s second floor will be divided between two large, light-filled classrooms. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Consigli Construction’s corporate values are reflected in signage at the gate to the Dana Chemistry Hall work site. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The coarsely textured material is fireproofing newly sprayed onto floor structure in Dana Chemistry Hall. The existing electrical equipment has plenty of life left in it and won’t be replaced during the current (pardon the pun) renovation. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Holes where a restroom used to be in Dana Chemistry Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Think of the built environments that appear in your dreams. Or of the buildings you pass by daily and don’t notice, versus the ones that are long gone but unforgettable. We aren’t philosophers (in case you hadn’t noticed), but it’s hard not to wonder at a weird similarity between solid structures and memories — both can seem so real and inhabitable, and yet are ultimately so ephemeral.

A similar topic came up the other day as we chatted with Chris Streifel, a project manager for �ֲ���ý Facility Services, about one of his top priorities, the renovation of Dana Chemistry Hall.

Prep for the renovation included a years-long inventory of the building’s contents and a plan for the disposition of all the supplies and equipment — for instance, what would go to the new Bonney Science Center versus what would go into an appropriate waste stream for no-longer-needed chemicals. (Or into Campus Construction Update’s basement for our TikTok Frankenstein tribute.)

Much of the inventory took place in Dana’s so-called attic, where stuff was stashed in storage areas amidst the air-handling machinery that dominated the fourth-floor space. Now that attic has been transformed — emptied and stripped down to bare wood, then lined with new insulation and wallboard, and now awaiting utility hookups and a new generation of HVAC equipment.

“It’s just a remarkable change from two years ago,” said Streifel. “There’s a few of us who get that feeling walking through there,” a certain resonance of the old amidst the new — “having worked through all of that stuff that had been stored for decades, stuff that was stored short-term, stuff that should’ve never been stored up there, and all of the old equipment and everything else.

“Watching those things progressively vanish was interesting. To see the progress there now is really kind of a strange thing. Every now and then you see a little vestige of what used to be mixed up with a hint of what’s yet to come.”

Until the archaeologists declare otherwise, though, the reinvention of Dana will take no breaks for history or remembrance. Indeed, technicians for various subcontractors are already in the attic roughing in MEP connections — mechanical, electrical, plumbing. Soon a self-leveling cementitious compound will be applied to pave the way, so to speak, for future flooring, and the crew from Roland’s Drywall will be erecting partition walls.

And Streifel expects the installation of that new HVAC gear to begin by mid-October.

One level down, Dana’s third floor is sealed in plastic while folks from Abatement Professionals of Westbrook, Maine, remove hazardous materials. That should be done by the second week of October, and will conclude abatement work for this project.

Meanwhile, progress on the first and second floors is showing how functional, aesthetic, and pedagogical goals for the Dana makeover will play out. Demolition is at, or past, the stage of tearing down walls, and the slow pivot from destruction to construction is beginning. Streifel said that the two floors are about on a par in terms of progress, but appearances are deceptive, just because there has been more to do on the bottom floor.

A major issue is that the first floor, entered from the outside from Alumni Walk, is actually the building’s ground floor (there is also a small basement beneath that). On the upper stories, pipes that need to run below floor level, such as drainage for wastewater or used chemicals, can be hung from the ceiling of the level below. But on the first floor, those pipes must be laid in trenches cut into the concrete floor slab and the soil beneath it.

All those trenches made a dramatic impression during our visit on Sept. 27, but they’ll soon be filled in.

Another first-floor wrinkle involves Room 119. A former lecture hall, 119 previously had tiered seating, but that feature has been rendered obsolete by the advent of the hands-on, student-centered pedagogical approach called active learning, and consequently by less “sage on the stage” style lecturing. So that floor couldn’t be trenched until after it was flattened. (At least, for once, it was a floor that was leveled, and not a playing field.)

With fewer walls still standing and none of those distracting trenches running all over the place, the second floor provides a clearer sense of the improved flow and transparency that’s central to the Dana renovation. For instance, back in the day, anyone using the main entrance from the Historic Quad was greeted by walls and restrooms. This was handy if you needed a restroom or, in the case of the walls, something to bang your head against. But otherwise it gave a poor impression.

In the new Dana, when you enter that front door, what greets you will be a nice welcoming hunk of space —the new, more commodious core of Dana. To your left and right you’ll see entrances into generously fenestrated, 48-seat active learning classrooms, with a smaller one to the rear. Restrooms throughout the building, meanwhile, will be relocated off to the side, closer to the elevator. (And there will be twice as many of them, they’ll have better soundproofing than before, and they will be ADA compliant.)

On both levels, Streifel explained, once the space is cleared out and cleaned up, that same kind of flooring compound will be poured. That’s likely to happen in the next week or two. And then wall construction will start.

Overall, Streifel is pleased by Dana’s progress since July, especially “given the uncertainties of a renovation project of this magnitude. And particularly this phase of it, the demolition phase,” he said.

“There are a lot of unknowns as you start digging into walls and taking things down in a building from this era. Obviously, we have concerns from a hazardous material standpoint and that’s gone very smoothly.

“We’re almost exactly where we wanted to be from a schedule perspective. A few little hiccups here and there, but we’ve been able to roll with what we found. So, largely everything’s going really well. And I think that the team is strong and got us off to a good start.”

He added, “we’re in that blissful kind of stage where things are, A, fortunately going pretty well; and B, it’s pretty simple work right now. We only have two or three contractors heavily onsite as opposed to the 10 or 15 that’ll be there in another few months. It’ll get a little more complicated then.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and dream narratives about current, past, and future construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “Who’s playing Igor in that TikTok?” in the subject line.