Housatonic Community College is in the middle of a $55-million expansion that will add more than 170,000 square feet of space, much of it from the makeover of a former Sears store.

According to New England Construction, the project involves gutting the store, giving it a new facade, and constructing a 20,000-square-foot addition. The project, designed by Perkins Eastman, will add 40 classrooms, faculty offices, a bookstore, a wellness center, and a 500-seat event venue, among other facilities. It is due to be completed in 2008.

The college, located in Bridgeport, Conn., expects to be able to increase enrollment from 4,700 to 5,500.

A University of Iowa art building that extends out over a quarry pond has won another award for its lead designers, Steven Holl Architects.

The facility, Art Building West, won a 2007 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in January. Now the Royal Institute of British Architects has honored the building with a 2007 International Award.

Two Australian university buildings were also among the eight Royal Institute award-winners — the L5 Building at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, and

New and renovated student housing at the University of Dayton will be open for three days of public tours during Citirama, an annual home show organized by the Home Builders Association of Dayton, Ohio.

The university and the association are collaborating on the show, during which visitors will be able to tour new five-unit townhouses as well as four renovated homes, one of them a turreted local landmark known as the Castle. The homes are located in one of four student neighborhoods in which the university owns a total of 328 properties, many with front porches and what the university describes as “small-town ambiance.”

Citirama takes place August 2-5. In recent years the home show has featured different Dayton neighborhoods that have undergone transformations.

Decrepit facilities are partly to blame for the impending closure of Antioch College — and if its trustees do raise enough money to reopen it, they say they’ll start by tearing down some of the college’s existing buildings and replacing them.

The Chronicle‘s Scott Carlson visited Antioch last week and found a campus that looks almost abandoned, with spalling bricks, rusting window frames, and weeds pushing through cracks in buckling asphalt walkways.

Over the years, he reports, the college fell far behind on maintenance. The residence halls, with group showers and inconsistent Internet access, are at least a generation behind those at other colleges.

Even worse is the cafeteria, which looks like a school lunchroom and offers limited hours and terrible food. Current and former students call it the nadir of the Antioch experience...

New York Law School, a fixture in lower Manhattan since 1891, is in the midst of a $190-million expansion that will add a new nine-level mixed-use building and renovate existing structures.

The key to the expansion, according to The New York Times, was the sale of the law school’s library building to a developer eager for property in the law school’s neighborhood, TriBeCa. The $136-million deal set off a complex series of moves designed to keep the 1,500-student law school running smoothly while construction proceeds on the new building, located on what had been a parking lot for the school.

To accommodate neighborhood height restrictions, four floors of the new, 210,000-square-foot building will be underground, where keeping out subway noise and water requires ...

Cornell University is hiring a top construction-management official away from the General Services Administration, the agency that oversees thousands of office buildings for the federal government. The official, Gilbert Delgado, will take over as Cornell’s new university architect on August 1.

Mr. Delgado is currently the GSA’s national director of construction and project management. In addition to his experience with design and construction, he has served on numerous committees named to choose architects for federal buildings, and has organized several design competitions.