We've Been Listening to You!

During the past six weeks, we've been talking with students, faculty and staff about the space plans for the renovated Sackler building. You gave us some great ideas, which we've incorporated into the plans.

Please look through the new slides and see your feedback come to life. Thanks to all the great suggestions, we have an even more exciting project with student space distributed through all nine floors of the building.

Here are some changes we've made:

Suggestion: More quiet study space rather than lounges and activity spaces.
The library now has two quiet glassed-in reading rooms on the 7th floor. These rooms group study spaces around large tables, complete with space to plug in lap tops.

Suggestion: Locate OSA and OEA in the midst of student traffic to promote accessibility.
We've moved OSA to the 4th floor, where they will be in the heart of student, resident and faculty traffic. OEA will stay on the 3rd floor, co-located with two of the learning communities.

Suggestion: Take advantage of light by placing the learning communities on the sunny side of the building.
The learning communities and classroom space have been interchanged so that sun will stream into the lounge and small study rooms.

Suggestion: Make the learning communities more spacious by removing the lockers.
The lockers are now around the periphery of the elevator lobby and in an island in the center of the lobby. This change allows us to install a kiosk bulletin board that will be an attractive and informative communications vehicle.

Suggestion: Eliminate the corridor seating on the 4th floor.
As configured in the feasibility study, it will become a cell phone area rather than an eating/mixing space. The layout of the 4th floor has changed to completely merge the library and the cafe. After allowing for traffic in the middle of the floor, a large seating area now appears on the window side.

Other innovations are based on more general feedback.

• We will install a large screen television in the Admissions conference room, for use on interview days to show videos and slides and for use at other times as a TV lounge.
• Classrooms are distributed throughout the building, with most on the learning community floors, 4 on the 8th floor to encourage traffic throughout the building, and two on the 5th floor (the noisy floor of the library). The number of classrooms stays the same as we have now.
• The 8th floor contains 12 small study/interview rooms. These will be used on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for admissions interviews and will be open at all other times for medical student study.
• The first floor multi-purpose room has been reconfigured into a rectangular shape, to allow better sight lines and to make it more usable. The new plan includes a kitchen staging area for food service.
• The basement enlarges the MRC to 100 seats by reconfiguring the corridor. The studio is maintained and the new plans provide access to the 1st floor auditorium through the basement.