Building Renovations Continue to Make Progress

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Major building renovations in conjunction with construction on Northwestern’s building addition are picking up speed.

Jim McDonald, MBA, vice president of administrative services at Northwestern Health Sciences University, said renovations to the existing building will occur as offices are moved to the new building.

The new 48,000-square-foot addition, the Wolfe-Harris Center for Excellence, is expected to be completed in September. According to Mark Zeigler, DC, President of Northwestern, “The new addition is progressing nicely. We are on schedule to begin moving offices of library services; student affairs; alumni, development, and career services; and research by mid-summer.”

Dr. Zeigler added that construction of the new Standard Process Healing Gardens located between the new addition and the main campus should begin in May or June 2008 and be completed by early September, 2008.

Kevin Wolpern, director of the physical plant at Northwestern, said construction on the new multipurposeclassroom, which will be built where L1, admissions and continuing education offices are currently, will not begin this spring as originally planned.

“We didn’t get the permits we needed from the city of Bloomington in time to begin the demolition phase this spring,” Wolpern explained.

“We have moved this project to Spring 2009,” said Dr. Zeigler, “and it should take four to five months to complete. So we are looking at a completion date of Sept. 1, 2009.”

The new classroom is designed so that it can be divided into several separate classrooms or as one large multipurpose classroom.

It will feature theater-style seating and have state-of-the arts multimedia resources.

In conjunction with construction of the new classroom, new sprinklers will be installed in the existing building. There should be no disruptions, Wolpern said, just additional workers in the hallways.

Once the research offices move out of the Wolfe-Harris Center for Clinical Studies, admissions will move to the vacated research offices. In addition, the bookstore will move to the location of the old library next fall after the addition opens, and a classroom is expected to go into the vacated bookstore space. The Greenawalt Library will be moving to the top floor of the new building.

The audiovisual office has been temporarily relocated into the student lounge, and other offices on campus may be impacted by all of the renovation work and departmental moves.

Northwestern Health Sciences University offers a wide array of choices in natural health care education including chiropractic, Oriental medicine, acupuncture, therapeutic massage, human biology, and integrative health and wellness. The University has more than 900 full-time students on a 25-acre campus in Bloomington, Minn.