During the month of April while students walk to their classes and prepare for finals, the University will start preparing for the new theatrical arts building, the Wolfe Center for the Arts.

Sherideen Stoll, the Vice President of Finance and Administration and the University’s Chief Financial Officer, said the official ground-breaking for the center will take place in April, but the actual construction will not start until sometime this summer or fall.

But, before all the construction takes place, bids from contractors need to be established.

Bob Waddle, associate vice president of Capital Planning, said that since the building is being state funded, the bidding goes on to a Web site at the State Architects Office where contractors from all over search for offers on a regular basis.

Waddle said once a contractor shows interest, Capital Planning gives them a month to put together their bids and then the University has to do background checks and receive final recommendations from the architects and take those recommendations to the state for the release of funds.

Stoll said the overall funding for the Wolfe Center will be $40 million.

“We are grateful, absolutely grateful for the state capital dollars that have been made available to make this happen,” Stoll said.

While the University benefits from receiving funds from the state, the current economic crisis may also help out.

“Typically in situations like this when you have a significant economic down-turn, contractors would generally propose within their bids very good prices for the work that they will do,” said Steven Krakoff, associate vice president of Capital Planning and Design. “It’s very competitive, so we will benefit from that.”

Stoll agreed and said the economic struggle was actually a positive for the University and that they also received “private gifts” right around $3 million.

With all the funds and help along the way, the Wolfe Center for the Arts will be home to the Department of Theater and Film.

Katerina Ray, director of the School of Arts, said the new facility will be a place for students to learn about different art forms such as theater, music, opera and musical theater, as well as digital arts such as animation, imaging, interactivity and multimedia.

“The quality of the facilities will mean that students will be well-trained in interdisciplinary performing arts and digital arts technologies, thus becoming far more competitive in the national arts, media and entertainment employment markets,” Ray said.

Ray is also a trained architect and helped give feedback on the location, design, planning and construction of the building.

The architecture of the 92,920 sq. foot building was specially designed in order to benefit the students and faculty in the Arts program.

“This is going to be an example of truly iconic architecture in the state of Ohio and beyond,” Krakoff said. “I think it’s just a superb building for the arts.”

Krakoff said that the Wolfe Center will be one of the few centers in the country that are “as architecturally distinct or as well-designed as this one.”

The facility will include three theaters, two computer labs, a makeup and dressing room area, costume storage, space for productions, lighting lab space, a green room, general classrooms, labs for Visual Communication Technology majors, faculty offices, a conference room, seminar rooms and more.

Waddle said this will be a real transition for theater and film majors because in the past in University Hall it was hard for them to set up the sets.

The faculty of the Theater and Film Department will also benefit by moving their offices from South Hall to the new building.

The faculty may be benefited by moving their offices into the University’s newest facilities, but they will also gain more of a connection with the Departments of Musical and Fine Arts.

The Wolfe Center will be in the middle of both the Fine Arts Center and the Moore Musical Arts Center.

Stoll said on the first floor of the Wolfe Center there will have two side entries with a corridor with skylights that lead to both the Fine Arts Center and the Moore Musical Arts Center.

“It’s supposed to be creating this arts neighborhood with a lot of sense of community, space and place,” Stoll said.

Another aspect that will connect all three of the arts departments is a central chiller plant that will be built near the Wolfe Center.

Currently, the Moore Musical Center, Fine Arts Center, as well as the Student Health Center, all have their own cooling systems that will need to be renovated soon. However, the central chiller plant will cool all three facilities including the Wolfe Center.

“This was a perfect opportunity to create a central cooling plant, and it’ll be real close to this Wolfe Center area and then that plant, which will obviously be a lot more efficient,” Waddle said.

The whole plan of this new building took time. Waddle said they started talking about coming up with a replacement space for the theater in 1999.

“It became a priority of the incoming provost at that point of time and his feelings were that it wasn’t so much of a programmatic need, as much as a physical need,” Waddle said.

The area where the Wolfe Center will exist is in the place of the old Saddlemire Student Services Building which came down in the summer of 2007.

The reason for eliminating the building was due to a feasibility study that was done in terms of renovating it. Based on the study, Waddle said it cost at least 10 percent more to renovate the facility than to build a new one.

Waddle also said another issue was the location of Saddlemire, because in the master plan it was to be closer to the center of campus.

When it came to the new theater facility, Waddle said they wanted to have all of the arts together by having them in a close proximity.