WATERVILLE — Colby College this year plans to start constructing a new science building, to be completed in the spring of 2014.

The 36,400-square-foot building will be on Colby Green, which is on the east side of Mayflower Hill Drive and is home to the Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center, as well as the Diamond Building and Lunder House.

“This is expected to be the fourth and final building (on the Green),” said Patricia Crandlemire Whitney, Colby’s director of physical plant.

The new building, which has not yet been named, will have four classrooms, three seminar rooms, multiple teaching and research laboratories and faculty and staff offices for psychology, mathematics and statistics and computer science departments, Whitney said Tuesday.

The building will be largely brick and glass and will have small gathering spaces for students, she said.

Pending the college’s Board of Trustee approval, the groundbreaking for the project will be this fall, she said.

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The Planning Board on Monday voted 6-0 to approve preliminary and final plans for the three-story building under the city’s site plan review ordinance, according to City Planner Ann Beverage. Board member Paul Mitchell was absent from the meeting.

The new building will allow the psychology and computer science departments, now housed in Roberts Union, to be moved to the academic core of the campus. The mathematics and statistics department is in the Mudd Building.

Whitney said Colby officials anticipate the new science building will receive LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

That certification provides independent third-party verification that a building, home or community was designed and built in a way that it achieves “high performance in human and environmental health, sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.”

Whitney said Colby has six LEED buildings.

Amy Calder — 861-9247

acalder@centralmaine.com


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