Five years from now, a UW-Madison freshman who has never known the splendor of Ogg Hall could stand at the site of the demolished dorm and see Lake Mendota. His gaze will fall down a pedestrian corridor, a tree-lined and brick-paved promenade, perhaps filled with students milling around public art or rushing from two new residence halls on the southern end of campus.
This was the scene envisioned Monday night at a meeting of the Joint Southeast Campus Area Committee, a collection of alders, UW-Madison officials and architects who laid out a general schedule for the redesign project that will occupy the eastern side of campus for the next several years.
According to Bill Patek, a senior landscape architect working on the project, the redesign will begin next month by laying utilities for a new dormitory and office building near the corner of Park and Regent streets and then progress north at a rate of a block per year.
The residence hall should be operational by fall 2006, with another dorm opening on Dayton Street the following year according to Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor of facilities planning and management for UW-Madison. Those dorms will provide the campus with 1,000 beds and allow the dismantling of Ogg Hall in 2008.
Additionally, the Peterson building should be demolished by 2007 and University Square will come down two years later, Fish said. New projects include redesigns of Library Mall and Memorial Union, as well a skyway-linked addition to the Elvehjem Museum and a performance space near the present site of University Square.
One of the last steps of the project will be the demolition of the Humanities building.
\The destruction of that building will be a gift to humanity itself,"" said Ald. Austin King, District 8.
For the past 100 years, city and university officials have envisioned a pedestrian corridor on the east side of campus, Fish said. This plan should come to fruition because it is linked with other building projects in the area.
""The conceptual north-south pedestrian connector on east campus has previously been a pipe dream of the planners, but now it is within reach,"" King said.
