A large format lecture hall that seats more than 600 people is in the process of being planned and is expected to be completed fall 2017. The California Lecture Hall will be constructed on the UC Davis campus at the corner of Storer Hall and California Avenue. The goal of the new lecture hall is to accommodate increasing class sizes and the upsizing of impacted courses.
“The project is intended to relieve classroom backlog and alleviate current course waitlists benefitting time to degree,” said Debra Smith, senior project manager of Design and Construction Management at UC Davis.
According to Smith, the new lecture hall will include a variety of building resources to strengthen building development and public outdoor spaces, and will be careful of respecting historic trees already on campus. It will also have sufficient bike parking to accommodate the large amount of students.
There are plans to follow requirements and budget constraints to be a net-zero energy facility, and the project is also in alignment with the California Sustainability Practices Policy.
The project is in the middle of a three month programming phase during which decisions about how the lecture hall will be used are going to be made. A workshop was held on Nov. 6 that included faculty, staff and students in order to figure out what technologies and environments would be best used in the hall.
Students, faculty and all others that use main lecture halls on the UC Davis campus are encouraged to provide input on the project via a survey released on Smartsite. The link for this survey is scheduled to be released this coming week.
Students and faculty will also be able to comment on the project through other social media sites. The survey allows students to rank the importance of various lecture hall characteristics such as indoor temperature, ability to hear the professor and other students and overall size and layout.
Allison Berkowitz, a second-year biological sciences major took the survey to provide input on the project.
“It will be beneficial to all to pinpoint the flaws in order to build the perfect lecture hall to promote academic success,” Berkowitz said.
