UAF engineering building: unfinished masterpiece awaits final funding.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Architects & Engineers - University of Alaska Fairbanks

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Every semester, incoming engineering students crowd into Room 252 of the Duckering Building on the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) campus to take their first required engineering class, ES101. The classroom seats eighty, but with more than two hundred incoming engineering students every year it can get cozy, even with multiple class sessions scheduled.

Enrollment at the UAF College of Engineering and Mines has doubled in the past decade to just under a thousand students, says Marmian Grimes, UAF senior public information officer.

"The interest in the degree program among students is there," Grimes says. "And we know, from Department of Labor statistics, that the demand from business and industry is strong as well."

The Duckering Building, which houses the program, is "bursting at the seams," she says, and its facilities are dated.

"You can imagine with a building designed in the '50s, just the demands of modern engineering, the types of lab facilities and things like that, we need to train engineers to work in today's industries. The bar's a lot higher."

2013 Ground Breaking

In 2013, the university broke ground on a $121 million state-of-the-art engineering facility designed by ECI/Hyer Architecture and Interiors of Anchorage. Davis Constructors & Engineers, Inc. is the general contractor. The gleaming six-story, 119,000-square-foot structure has a commanding view of the Tanana Valley and the Alaska Range to the south.

Nested between the Duckering and Bunnell buildings on the east side of campus, the Engineering Learning and Innovation Facility has a distinctive curved glass and steel exterior and is designed to provide forty laboratories, a forty-eight -foot high-bay facility, offices, and classrooms, including one large enough to seat the entire incoming freshman class in one ES101 session, according to Cameron Wohlford, UAF Department of Design and Construction senior project manager.

However, only $70 million of the total funding needed for construction has been received and construction was halted in August 2015. The $34.8 million requested for fiscal year 2017 was not included in the governor's budget and Grimes does not know if, when, or from where the final amount will come. Every year of delay adds about $3 million to the total cost, in addition to the current $500,000 or so annual maintenance costs.

If the project had been fully funded from the start, it would have been completed in July 2015 and hosted...