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The demolition of Stanley Hall is underway. (Credit: Allison Brede) |
The Big Crunch: the fall and rise of Stanley Hall
BERKELEY - A long-reach cruncher will start taking bites out of UC Berkeley's Stanley Hall at 9 a.m. Thursday, April 3, as demolition of the outdated and seismically poor research building shifts into high gear. The 50-year-old building is expected to be down by May, with excavation and foundation work for a new and larger research building continuing through the summer.
Construction of a seismically safe structure will begin by the end of the year. Upon completion in early 2006, it will become the UC Berkeley center of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3). Another building to house QB3 researchers is under construction at UC San Francisco.
The Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility, as the building will be called, will be a major addition to the campus's Health Sciences Initiative, which promotes interdisciplinary research among faculty in the biological and physical sciences. The new building also will house a special laboratory - an innovative Bio-Nano Center dedicated to the fabrication of bio-MEMS and microrobotic devices on the microscopic and sub-microscopic scale - for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). Both QB3 and CITRIS were launched in 2000 with state and private funds as part of Gov. Gray Davis' California Institutes of Science and Innovation.
The new Stanley building will contain approximately 40 laboratories to house faculty on the cutting edge of bioscience research who investigate areas such as imaging, structural biology, computational and theoretical biology, and tissue engineering.
The total budget for the project is about $162 million, a combination of state and private funds that were designated for the project in 2000.
The demolition and new building construction can be followed live, via Webcam.
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The Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility, which will replace Stanley Hall. |