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New SAS Building encourages intra-office collaboration

Posted on | March 3, 2010 | 2,993 views |

By Adam King

The new Student Academic Services Building (SAS) on the corner of Tuttle Park Place and Lane Avenue has some unique aspects to it, but mostly it is a building of necessity. In this case, extravagant design was left to other campus architecture.

It will be better known for bringing together related departments, previously scattered across different floors and even different buildings, in the same area under one roof. 

The offices of Student Financial Aid and the University Registrar were the first groups to move into SAS, first vacating their Lincoln Tower location in 2008 and then recently transitioning from their swing space at Fawcett Center. The Athletics Department will take over the space in the Fawcett Center. Both Financial Aid and the Registrar offices had previously been housed on several floors of Lincoln Tower, as well as in Fawcett Center.

“Because we had a major hand in designing the space in SAS, we could think about our functions and roles in terms of service and be sensitive to our work environment,” said Brad Myers, university registrar. “What has to strike you is the openness.”

Indeed, only one personal office in the six-floor structure sits on an outer wall, freeing up the windows to bring in a plethora of natural light. Supervisors’ offices instead are built parallel to the length of the building but inset into the middle of each floor so they are looking out over a sea of work stations.

And it is a sea. Each floor’s open office area is 300 feet long, the size of a football field. Myers said everyone was joking while moving in about just how much exercise they would be getting when crossing the floor to speak to a colleague, but it is quite the haul.

Having the entire department on one floor, however, has already shown signs of increased collaboration and problems being solved more quickly.

“Day to day staff are running into one another and working on things together in very different ways than they did in the past,” Myers said. “If people are working on something, they run into a snag and there is somebody from another work area who in the past would have been on another floor or another building, they can now just help and jump in. And I know we can be even more efficient.”

Some units are still moving in but they should be fully in place before the end of the month.

Most of the student foot traffic should stay on the first floor with the Student Consolidated Services Center there, as well as counseling for Graduate and Professional Admissions. The Consolidated Services Center merged the public service functions for the Bursar, the Registrar and Financial Aid. The Office of the University Bursar is on the second floor, the Office of Minority Affairs is on the third floor, Student Financial Aid takes up the fourth floor and the new Testing Center (which offers, for example, the ACT, GRE and LSAT exams) joins the Registrar on the fifth floor. The sixth floor is dedicated to the units’ fiscal offices, human resources, tech support and the rest of Graduate and Professional Admissions.

Each group got to plan the layout of its floor, so the result is varied-size conference space and technology training rooms. All new campus buildings get a lactation room, and that is on the second floor. And two showers were added on the sixth floor for employees who bike in to work.

The one truly unique aspect of the building is how it overhangs its base on the west end. Steel girders crisscross the interior from the second floor up to hold the weight of the cantilevered space.

It is the second building on campus — after the Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4H Center — that hopes to become LEEDS Silver certified, making it an officially recognized “green” building.

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