After being under construction for most of the semester, the new Fine Arts and Design Studios (FADS) building held an official ribbon cutting ceremony to open up building.
Mark Cowardin, the Chair of the Art Department, was happy to share with us the benefits of the new building.
“I think, compared to our old facility, we’re light-years ahead of where we were, safety is, you know, one of the lines in my curriculum, one of the course objectives we talk about,” Cowardin said. “Learning how to use the studio environment in a safe way. In the old building I think we talked more about safety than we could actually, really illustrate and so the safety features in this building are spectacular. Ventilation we never had before, fume mitigation, safety is a huge bonus.”
We also talked to students and staff about their thoughts on the building as well. Joel Springer, student, shared with us his opinion on the new building.
“What’s nice about having a new building is just, the environment,” Springer said. “It’s a lot more inspiring to have like a clean building that’s new and designed well. And, if you go in the classrooms, I think it’s designed well for creatives to have discussions and just kind of work together and, uh, especially in graphic design as we’re working in teams, trying to get projects done, it’s great to have, I don’t know, just a new space.”
Cowardin said, “I think, especially compared to our old space, it’s a very inspiring space. The light is spectacular…its’ just a beautiful space to work in.”
Others, like Tatumn Eskra, student, weren’t so happy with the process it took to prepare.
“Basically, this building, felt like more of a problem than a good thing,” Eskra said. “I know it’s kind of a time crunch in between semesters trying to put the building together, but not being able to do any kilns or anything until about mid-semester is kind of an issue because we couldn’t get anything done on any of our projects or anything. I mean it’s going well now, we only have minor issues at this point but we took a long time to get like our glaze lab, we couldn’t use any of it this semester, which is kind of disappointing because it’s my last semester here.”
The building itself lies between the Regnier Center and the Galileo Parking Garage, next to the Culinary Building. There’s plenty of greenery planted and sitting areas outside as well.
If you plan on taking any arts courses next semester, you can look forward to classes in this beautiful and inspiring space. From the Campus Ledger, I’m Simone Griggs.