On March 17, the University of Connecticut announced in a UConn Today article that renovations to the Gant Science Complex North Wing will begin in the summer of 2025. This is the final phase in a series of renovations that Gant has undergone, with the South Wing and West Wing completing renovations in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
Elizabeth Craun, the director of major projects in the university planning, design and construction department, talked about what the renovations will entail in an interview with the Daily Campus.
According to Craun, floors G, one and two will “focus on student services and instruction.”
“The primary use is classrooms for the science program, and that includes BIO 1000’s dedicated spaces, [ecology and evolutionary biology] dedicated spaces, as well as flexible science classrooms,” said Craun. “Those programs are all growing, UConn is growing as a whole, so floors G through two are really focused on supporting undergraduate education.”
Craun added that another addition on the ground floor will be a dedicated tutoring space for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences students.
“Another nice feature of this renovation is that on the ground floor, there’s going to be an advising and tutoring suite for CLAS,” said Craun. “That’s a space that really doesn’t exist as a dedicated space right now, it’s been a need that’s been identified for a long time for CLAS. It’s going to provide tutoring services, it’s going to provide advising and support spaces, and it’s really just a dedicated facility for that identified need.”
The third floor and a newly added fourth floor will house spaces for future research projects, although the specific projects haven’t been determined yet, according to Craun.
“Floors three and four are going to be prepared for future research, but because we want to stay flexible and not allocate those spaces to a user yet, they’ll be fit out for the future to accommodate future needs…All of the mechanicals will be put in, but they won’t be finished,” said Craun. “When the user or occupant of those floors is identified, then there will be a trailing project. It may happen under the Gant project; it may happen as a separate project.”
The renovations will begin once graduation ends and is set to be completed in the 2027-2028 academic year.
“We’ll probably see the shovel in the ground sometime around June 1st… we really take advantage of the summer because it’s a lower traffic period… and then we know that we’ll be opening in the 27-28 academic year,” said Craun. “The goal is to open for fall 2027… [but] we may be opening for the spring semester of 2028. That’s somewhat up in the air right now. We are still driving for fall 2027, but we do want to be transparent that we might be making a decision to open for spring 2028 instead.”
Craun said that the northwest entrance of Gant and the adjacent sidewalk will be closed during the construction process.
According to the UConn Today article, this project is a part of the UConn 2000 initiative, and it received funding from the state’s Next Generation Connecticut initiative. The NextGenCT initiative has previously funded UConn projects such as the renovation of Monteith Building in 2016 and the construction of the Science 1 Research Center.
According to Craun, the Institute for Material Sciences used to be housed in Gant North before being moved to the Science 1 Research Center after its completion. Gant North has been vacant since the construction of the center, so there “won’t be any loss of space for usage” during the renovations.