News
October 2009
A Dream Deferred, a Future Worth the Wait
From the eighth floor of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), Alan Fish (left),
Teresa Adams (center), and Mark VanderWoude can view the parking lot (seen in right backdrop)
where the new Nursing Science Center will be constructed. (Photo: Todd Brown)
It had been quite a week.
One day, $28 million in funding to help build a new University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Nursing building had been unexpectedly allocated by the state joint finance committee in a late-night budget meeting at the Capitol. A few days later, the money was gone, eliminated in a new version of the budget—a gift given, then snatched away.
Then, the local media suddenly took an interest in it. The Wisconsin State Journal ran a front-page story and photo. Even out-of-state newspapers were covering the story.
The Chicago Tribune headline read "Assembly Democrats Don't Want Nursing School."
Nursing schools from around the country were calling, too. What was going on in Wisconsin? Despite projections of a severe nursing shortage over the next twenty years, was it true that the State of Wisconsin really did not want a new nursing school building to help educate more nurses?
That same week, when faculty and staff came together on a Friday afternoon in June for a school-wide building planning session, a whirlwind of questions swirled across the room. Was the university really behind this project? What did this budget brouhaha really mean? Had all of this attention about the new building helped or hurt the school's prospects for building the new $47 million Nursing Science Center?
And the biggest question of all: Was there really ever going to be a new School of Nursing building?
These were legitimate questions. Many participants at that Friday afternoon planning session knew that the quest for a new School of Nursing facility dated back at least to the early 1990s, and probably earlier.
In fact, during the twenty-seven years that Mark VanderWoude, assistant dean for facilities and planning, has been at the School of Nursing, the school's space in the Clinical Science Center (CSC), he says, has undergone three large remodeling projects and dozens of smaller renovations to address changing needs and adapt to a less-than-ideal educational space in the CSC. There had also been consideration in the late 1990s given to relocating the school to the bottom seven floors of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) building on Walnut Street. However, there were no teaching classrooms in that plan. Ultimately, the decision was made to pursue building a new facility.
In 2001, a plan for a 48,000-squarefoot facility was submitted to the UW–Madison Campus Planning Committee. It became a top campus construction priority. Unfortunately, there was no state money for building that year. Over the next eight years, the drive and dream for a new building did not go away. In fact, the size doubled to 93,000 square feet, primarily to incorporate more teaching classrooms, more research space, and room for an expected 30 percent future growth.
"We have tweaked our current building as much as we can," VanderWoude says. "We've used up all of our opportunities in this space."
Now, as the June planning meeting was getting under way, the arrival of the afternoon's 'guests' gave the affair a hopeful sense of possibility that maybe the school's building quest was not a pipe dream after all. Associate Vice Chancellor Alan Fish and Capital Budget Administrator Teresa Adams—two key leaders overseeing the construction of $800 million in new campus buildings in the coming biennium—were on hand to field questions and discuss the project. When Doug Sabatke, a UW campus architect, was introduced as the project manager, there was a collective gasp. The new building has a project manager! Suddenly, the long-talked-about Nursing Science Center seemed to be taking shape.
Fish addressed the media controversy about the building being added and then removed from the state budget. "You've probably been hearing a lot about this building in the papers, and I imagine it's a little confusing," Fish began. People shifted in their chairs, nodding their heads, paying attention, waiting.
The west campus master plan includes 1) Clinical Science Center/University
Hospital and Clinics (UWHC), 2) American Family Children's Hospital, 3) Waisman
Center, 4) Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (WIMR), 5) Health Sciences
Learning Center, 6) Rennebohm Hall/Pharmacy, 7) site for proposed Nursing
Science Center, 8) WARF, and 9) UWHC parking ramp. (Drawing: Zimmerman Architectural Studios, Inc.)
"Our plan all along was to design it
in 2009–2011 and build
it in 2011–2013," Fish
said. "It was important
for people to know also
that we had a plan to
execute it that did not
require the Legislature to
vote on it right now and
for people to understand
what the plan would
be, which is largely to
use gift funds to do
the design and put it
through the campus
planning committee and
the Board of Regents
and get it in front of the Legislature in
2011. So frankly, these recent events
may prove helpful when we go back
to the process, because there will be
people who wanted to do it this year
who will be even more motivated to
get it into the budget in 2011."
Fish stopped for a moment to let what he'd just said sink in.
"I think it's important to emphasize one more thing," he said. "We have never designed a building that we didn't build."
Currently, the school's building planning is in full force: numerous subcommittees are at work, making assessments about space and functional needs with Sabatke. Adams and Fish make themselves available to talk about how the university process works for building a new facility.
"You really do need to be aware of the fact that this is the best chance you'll ever have to recreate yourself," Fish says. "So many programs are limited, restricted or directed based on their physical space. Nursing is a good example right now."
"When you recreate yourself in a new facility, it gives you a chance to rethink your mission and functions. Nursing will now have a chance to create an identity, create a brand that's definable here on campus. The visibility of that site and the proximity to the HSLC will make nursing symbolically an equal partner in the whole academic health center," he explains.
According to Fish, the old institutional construction aesthetic held that buildings, and their interiors, were created to last hundreds of years, making them very difficult to remodel. "We're now building hybrids," he says. "The exteriors, the ceilings, the building envelope, the mechanicals, and the windows are really robust, but inside, they're more changeable. You want to have a building that is easy to remodel and repurpose over time."
The new building, Teresa Adams says, also needs to retain a human scale. "In preplanning meetings, we heard a lot that the human scale doesn't really exist over in your building right now. You also need to take into account the space outside the building. And we need to keep in mind that nursing is an undergraduate as well as a graduate environment."
With a $6 billion budget deficit, the recession is hitting the state hard. The way Fish sees it, however, the economic downturn is actually a good time to build.
"In some ways, it's a counter-cyclical investment the state is making right now in a very deep recession," he says. "Two things are happening. One, we're getting great value for our construction investment because there's so much competition. Two, because there are so many construction workers out of work, and construction companies with not enough jobs to do, the fact that the state still is in the building business is keeping people in jobs."
And so, after basic planning and doing a national search for architectural firms, what else will the school need to do?
"There's a process that the campus uses to prioritize their capital projects," says Adams, "a process that Dean May and the nursing project will be working on in the fall. We'll be making presentations to our campus planning committee, and they will have to priority-rank any project that has a state funding component. We'll send those to UW System, and they will priority-rank for the regents all of the campus projects. You have to keep advocating for your project: it's really important to make a good argument, a strong justification on the campus…and have your initial funds."
Given the school's history in trying to get the new building construction off the ground, it seems unlikely that anyone will take for granted the necessity of making a good argument for the building. Certainly, VanderWoude won't.
"All I can say is that it's about time!" VanderWoude says. "The development, design, and building of this project will take me into my retirement from the university."