Shop Talk: Delays for Gehry Building, Preservation Worries in Amherst

Slowdown in Princeton: The opening of Princeton University’s much-anticipated new Frank Gehry building has been pushed back more than a year because of construction delays, according to The Daily Princetonian, the university’s student newspaper. The 87,000-square-foot building, the Lewis Science Library, is now scheduled to open in the fall of 2008. It will feature a series of curving roofs and towers that rise up alongside the university’s poured-concrete mathematics tower. The university dismissed the first contractor working on the structure, Skanska USA, and brought in Barr and Barr to finish the work, the newspaper reports.

Preservation in Amherst: An organization called Preserve UMass says it has succeeded in getting the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on Preservation Massachusetts’s 2007 list of most-endangered historic resources. According to a news release forwarded by Preserve UMass, the “campus was named because of the university’s failure to fund a professional assessment of the campus’s history and architecture.” Preserve UMass says the university administration is planning to demolish several historic structures on the campus, including the 1885 South College building and the 1886 West Experiment Station (above).

Dance in Oklahoma: Oklahoma City University’s School of Dance and Arts Management now has a building of its own, after the university commissioned a $7.25-million renovation and expansion of an existing structure, according The Journal Record, a business publication in Oklahoma City. The new facility includes seven dance studios with special flooring that almost busted the project’s budget, until the dean of the dance program decided to install the flooring — and the cables that give it its bounce — himself. He had help from several staff members and figures he brought the floors’ cost down from $500,000 to $130,000.