Blending Tradition and Innovation: Building the Future at the University of Arkansas

So we're in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on campus at University of Arkansas, building the student success center for the UVA. This building is meant to house tutoring and mentoring that will help all kinds of first generation college students, minority college students will really anybody on campus that may need additional tutoring or mentoring support Being alumni from University of Arkansas. I've really enjoyed being able come back to campus and build multiple buildings with the University of Arkansas. Through those relationships, we meet a lot of great architecture firms. Core architects has been you know, a great team teammate on this project. Obviously, they designed this beautiful building and without their help and coordination and attention to detail, you know, we couldn't do what we do. Core was brought on to work on the initial planning stages of this project with our on call contract with the University of Arkansas and the facilities management group. One of the things about this project that's most unique is the architectural style. It's this collegiate Gothic style that kinda has its own own sense of place here on campus at the university. Look around other buildings surrounding the student success center, and and there's a mixture of different types of limestone and sizes and scales and So the real challenge was to to create a a contemporary functioning space with a modern program that looks architecturally like it's intended to be here amongst buildings that have been around for eighty and ninety years campus. We use laser scanning in a in a number of different ways on this project. Like all of our BCC projects, we are using that technology. Number one, to verify the accurate layout, but also this project had a pretty heavily extensive bim coordination effort, and so that laser scanning allows us to verify that what we are building is per plans and specs and per that coordination. Everyone essentially modeled almost every component of this building virtually before it was built. And in an effort to avoid a lot of the clashes and conflicts that happen when you've got a lot of different parts and pieces that have to come into a small space and their on staff architect led that process and having an architect on their staff also helps because, you know, kind of have our own languages that that we speak and the work that we do and having that sort of translation, I think, really really helps to streamline the process. Those buildings didn't have mechanical systems. They didn't have central heat and air back in the day. So now that these buildings need the comforts of heat and air, we had to design a system that's called chilled beam technology. Essentially, we pump not only just hot or cold air to each space, we also pump hot or cold water to each space. With that hot or cold water, it induces airflow to help heat or cool the space and it ends up being a more energy efficient unit for the end user in the long term. One of the great benefits is you'll see on the outside of the building, there's two types of limestone One is an Indian lime stone for more cut and and profiled pieces. But then the the stone that's mixed in between those sort of a random pattern is is a type of limestone that's actually quarried from Batesville, Arkansas. So the limestone on this building from Batesville is from the exact same quarry that provided the limestone on buildings that are nearby here on campus built in the thirties and forties. And so that was a challenge but provided a pretty pretty unique opportunity to make an almost perfect match when we're pulling materials from the exact same place on on in the earth. And these projects are, you know, on average, three years in the making. So you really get to know these guys and work with them closely and, you know, it's just a fun process. Working with Mason and the general contractor and the design architects as well as university facilities management. Seeing that come together and really gel and and match what our what what our intention was. It's been really an exciting process that it's been very very worthwhile. There'll never be another building like this. Up here and to have this once in a lifetime opportunity to build it really means a lot to me.