Cornell College is wrapping work on Cornell’s Mclennan College Hall’s $3.6 million renovations. An open house was held at the college Friday morning to highlight the improvements to the building.
Renovations to the historic building were nearly completed in three months.
“From the perspective of classes starting and people using offices, we were able to have those items ready and accessible on day one of classes beginning,” said Scott Ladwig, Cornell’s Construction projects manager. “Classes did not miss a beat to start at the beginning of the year.”
Like all construction projects, this project has been met with delays due to COVID-19 impacts to the supply chain, Ladwig said.
“We encountered delays to a number of supplies – from the blowers for the HVAC system being delayed, to wiring, paint electronics and sheet rock,” Ladwig said. “That led to a lack of sleep as we worked on those logistics issues.”
The college had been smart by preparing for the project by pre-buying some supplies to help keep the costs from overrunning the budget significantly, Ladwig said.
“We focused on what we could do to keep the project on track and tackle those projects until the supplies for some of the other items came in,” he said.
It’s why there was still some work going on during this current block break to the second and third floors as the college and contractors were working on a few more punch items.
Ladwig noted that they’re still waiting for a few items to arrive, including some linoleum flooring and carpet pieces.
The costs for many of these construction items have also had an impact on contractors who worked on this project.
“We’ve had a few contractors who had to drop out of the project because these costs impacted their business to stay afloat,” Ladwig said. “We’re talking significant costs for some of these items if you don’t have the ability to wait for them.”
Ladwig noted that he feels the changes made to the building have made a historical building much safer.
“I take pride in the work our guys have done on this project,” Ladwig said. “We haven’t damaged anything. We made this building better.”
One of the most significant changes to Mclennan College Hall is a new HVAC system, which improved the air filtration. Those improvements, including moving the blowers down the hill, allows for a more comfortable working and learning environment and future expansion of HVAC to other buildings.
New network infrastructure wil allow students to use wireless internet connections inside and even outside the classroom.
The 36-inch-thick walls in the building provided a few logistic challenges to the project, but contractors found ways to work around that and add the necessary upgrades to electrical and network infrastructure.
The crown jewel of the project has been the financial technology classroom, which includes a running stock market ticker, as well as more displays for students to show their work and interact with classmates.
A lot of the changes to Mclennan College Hall were made to assist with development of the college’s graduate programs in finance and business, assistant director of facilities services Cari Morgan said. The college has a partnership with the University of Iowa on those fronts, and might have additional program information to announce at the end of the year.
There’s still work that needs to be completed to the landscaping around the building. One of the issues with the drought this summer was not being able to get grass seeded.
The building does have larger decks to the outside of both the east and west of the building, which will allow students and professors to take some of their classes outside if they want or need to.
And some of the improvements, like a security camera, will help with the ability of the college to livestream commencement exercises in the quad.
“It’s great we’re doing work to prepare this building for the next 100 years for this building,” Morgan said.
The new handicap accessible entryway to the front of Mclennan College Hall. Seeding for new grass wwill still happen later this fall, as the drought impacted the ability of the grass seed to work out properly.