The East Campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison is undergoing dramatic changes.

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By July, a 3.1-acre site that formerly housed a salvage yard, gas station and garbage truck parking will be home to a six-story residence hall, seven-story office/parking structure and one-story cylindrical university welcome center.

"It's a great new gateway and entry," said Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor, facility planning and management of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "It's a major transformation of how people arrive on campus."

Public/Private Joint Venture

To expedite the $83 million Park Street Development, which began in October 2004, the university initiated a unique ownership structure.

Appleton-based Oscar J. Boldt Construction bought half of the site's land, while the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System already owned the other half.

Boldt issued 30-year variable rate taxable notes to finance 100 percent of the project.

Boldt owns all the buildings, but the state and university can exercise their right to purchase part of parts of the project. For example, upon completion of the project, the university will purchase the residence hall, parking ramp and service garage. It will be moving into the entire complex this summer.

The university will be leasing the office portion of the project for four years and thereafter plans to buy the office component. With the sale proceeds, Boldt will pay off its notes and the university will completely own and operate the buildings.

"Almost all of our developments have been traditional projects where we've bought the land and built a building within the state contracting process," Fish said. "Our goal is to purchase the buildings cost effectively."

This ownership structure is the first of its kind for the UW system and is a model for other developments on the UW campus.

"In the last year and a half we were able to move quickly and build space less expensively and use land close and adjacent to campus that we otherwise couldn't afford to buy," Fish said. "Part of using this model was an experiment to see if we could build good solid buildings outside of state process. We accomplished that, and it'll be interesting to see how many times this model will be used."

Former Salvage Yard

Since the site housed a salvage yard and gas station, there was substantial environmental remediation required. Truckloads of the contaminated soil were hauled off to a landfill. The project also involved moving 6- to 13-ft.-diameter storm sewers as well as Madison Gas and Electric lines.

This sitework took about two months.

The site is tight and is a main thoroughfare into campus, and so daily coordination and rapport with the community, an adjacent UW building and private residences was important throughout the project, said Eric Swanlund, project manager for Boldt.

Residence Hall

UW hasn't added a new dorm in more than 30 years, and student housing certainly has changed since then.

"We're revitalizing all of our residence halls on the Madison campus," Fish said. "We're tearing down some built in the 1960s; but before we can do that, we need an equivalent amount of housing."

The new residence hall adds 425 beds, and another residence hall planned at Park and Dayton will add another 600 beds. The obsolete two-tower Ogg Hall will be torn down in fall 2007 and replaced with a park.

UW has 28,000 undergrads and 6,600 beds. The new residence hall on Park Street will provide 220-sq.-ft. rooms shared by two students. Two to three rooms, or up to five students, will share one bathroom, rather than dozens of students.

"We focused on freshman and sophomores so it's not a suite-style or apartment-style," Fish said. "We wanted to build a community without one gang shower down a long corridor."

The new residence hall is a cast-in-place concrete structure with a precast exterior and glass.

"A fair amount of student input was put into the design," said Gregg Prossen, vice president of Milwaukee-based Zimmerman Design Group.

Floors two through six are identical, providing meeting space and unique social alcoves similar to miniature living rooms. "Instead of walking down a long corridor and not socializing, the alcoves down the corridor space will encourage mingling between non-roommates," Prossen said.

Prossen described the exterior as classic European architecture. Both the outside and inside color palettes feature warm earth tones. The exterior precast's detailed reveals and varying types of aggregate finish define architectural elements. First-floor windows are transparent to see the activity inside.

Office/Parking Building

The office/parking building offers a 342-space parking ramp topped with three floors providing 139,000 sq. ft. of office space for the university's registrar, financial aid and other administrative and student services.

Screens will be installed around the perimeter of the first four floors to hide the parking and to create "a unified building, not just an office building sitting on top of the garage," said John Cain, senior principal at Milwaukee-based Kahler Slater Architects.

The design also gives prominence to the UW Welcome Center, a one-story addition to the office building along Park Street. "The cylinder shape gives the whole street elevation a better sense of human scale," Cain said. "Coming down Park Street as well as going north from the Beltline, it will draw visitors on their way to campus to stop at that welcome center where there's parking available."

While the interior office space will sport quite a bit of color, the exterior precast concrete is a buff color similar to the residence hall.

With a tight budget, the entire office structure, including the columns, beams, floors and exterior, used precast concrete. As a result, the building went up quickly.

The Park Street development's new office/parking building will replace the Peterson Building, an old campus administration building. The university plans to expand the Chazen Museum of Art on the site of the former Peterson Building.

Murray Mall

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