For those of you interested, I just received this email with regards to the new law school construction.
At its meeting yesterday, the Board of Trustees unanimously approved
the construction of a building that will serve as the new home of the Law
School and provide housing for students in Fordham College at Lincoln
Center.
The new building, which will cost $250 million and be situated
immediately to the west of the present Law School building on 62nd Street,
has been designed by the architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners,
and will rise 22 stories. (The Law School will occupy the first nine
stories of the building. The residence hall, which will accommodate 430
undergraduates, will occupy the top twelve stories of the building.)
Although I am admittedly prejudiced in this regard, I believe that when it
is completed, it will be the most architecturally significant building in
the Lincoln Center area. Indeed, I believe that it will quickly be hailed
as one of the most stunning academic buildings in the country. (In order
to substantiate my hopes and claims, I ask that you go to
http://www.fordham.edu/fordhamuplans to view a number of the renderings of the new
building.)
As you know, the University has been working quite assiduously for
more than seven years to secure all of the necessary approvals from the
City of New York and to line up financing for this project, and it was only
in the past few months that we were able to overcome all of the obstacles
that stood in our way. The approvals that we have secured from the city,
the courts and the Board, however, represent only the completion of the
first phase of this important undertaking. In light of the complexity of
the designs of the building and the challenges associated with construction
in New York, we expect that although we will begin construction on the
project immediately, the building will not be ready for occupancy until the
Fall of 2014. When it is completed, however, it will transform the
University in two significant ways: it will provide us with a world-class
building; and it will enhance the educational experience of every student
on the Lincoln Center campus.
With regard to the educational benefits that the University will
realize from the new building, I will merely point to a few:
1. The Law School: The new building will provide the Law School with
349,000 square feet of space (as compared with the 159,000 square feet of
space that it has in its present home), thus allowing it to expand the
services that it offers to its students in significant ways.
3. When the Law School moves into its new home, the present Law School
building will become available for use by schools and other units of the
Lincoln Center community. This, of course, will allow the University to
address some of the overcrowding problems that have bedeviled Fordham
College at Lincoln Center, Fordham College of Liberal Studies, the Graduate
School of Education, the Graduate School of Business and the Graduate
School of Social Service. As a result, these schools will finally be able
to move forward with academic programs that we have dreamed of for many
years, and to provide our graduate and undergraduate students with better
services.
The coming years will, I am sure, be filled with some degree of
disruption on the Lincoln Center campus. I assure you, however, that we
will do all we can to minimize that disruption. For today, however, I
invite you to rejoice, for today is a day that will be remembered as the
day on which the University publicly announced the most ambitious (and most
costly) capital project in its history, a project that will transform our
beloved Fordham and enable it to serve its students with greater
effectiveness.
Nonetheless, congrats to those accepted! I'm starting to get nervous about my 3.35/170 for Fordham. Was kinda treating my acceptance/denial at Fordham as my bellweather of this cycle's success...
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