The excitement was easy to pick up on in the Cottonwood Room at the K-State Student Union as Workshop Architects presented it’s designs for the $25 million upgrade to the Student Union on K-State’s campus. Many posters of the updated Student Union were up for viewing, highlighting the new designs and improvements to the original building built for the students in 1956.

Bill Smriga, Executive Director of the Union, introduced the Workshop Architects who were there for their fifth and final visit to workshop their plans for the updated Union. K-State students approved a referendum last fall to approve a $25 million upgrade to the Union. At the moment the project is in the programming and concept phase, where research is and has been conducted on the needs of campus and initiation of focus groups and committees with current students have been established to identify the needs of the campus.

Following this phase will be the design phase, after going to the state approval. Following will be a bid, then construction phases. The biggest changes will be a wall of windows on the southwest corner, as well on most outside of the walls, in order to incorporate natural light into the building. This will incorporate a relationship between the welcome center at the Old Stadium and the Union, with a walk way on the ground level as well as a balcony from the proposed upstairs sports pub.

The atrium will also be addressed in the first phase of renovations, with a walkway curving through the second level to help with a new, circular pathway around the core of the Union. Retail areas will be moved from the edges to the center of the building, creating a more transparent view of the Union. The bookstore will be view-able from the outside from the ground floor, which will also hold the computer store and copy services cluster. Student services will be arranged together too, in a sleek open-office design meant to increase productivity and collaboration.

The production kitchen will be completely redone with state of the art equipment, as earlier renovations of the Union have only addressed the eating areas. The third floor plan will house the veterans center, which needs an improvement in square footage. Sustainability was addressed in a Q&A after the presentation, with assurance that after the concept phase many options to create an environmentally friendly upgrade to the building would be established.