$14-Million CSUN Center Is Solution to Science Woes

One day last week during a biology class in the 28-year-old science building at California State University, Northridge, a pipe burst and showered a student with waste water, Prof. Warren Furumoto said.

“I had to tell her to go home and wash off,” said Furumoto, who is chairman of the biology department.

Citing this incident and the generally unsafe, overcrowded conditions in the school’s aging science facility, Furumoto and other professors, university officials and politicians Saturday grabbed shovels and broke ground for a $14-million science center.

“The old building has been bulging at the seams ever since it was built,” said Donald Bianchi, dean of the School of Science and Mathematics.

Planetarium Included

The three-story Natural Science Laboratories Building, scheduled to be occupied in 1989, will have chemistry and biology laboratories and a 120-seat planetarium.

Along with funds for the new structure, $2 million will be spent to renovate the old building and another $2 million will go toward purchasing sophisticated scientific instruments and computers that Bianchi said should make CSUN competitive with other schools in the state university system.

About half the structure will be used for chemistry and biochemistry studies, said Paul Klinedinst, chairman of the chemistry department. Part of the building will have a reinforced foundation designed to accommodate sensitive equipment such as a $300,000 spectrometer to study the behavior of molecules.

Protection for Instruments

The new lab complex will provide a better home for costly instruments than the old one, Klinedinst said. Santa Ana winds have frequently blown dust through loose-fitting windows in the old building, damaging sensitive equipment and interfering with experiments, he said.

Some renovation funds will be used to replace a ventilation system that professors said has occasionally spread noxious fumes throughout the building instead of expelling them. In contrast, the new facility will have sophisticated air conditioning and ventilation to provide dust-free conditions.

A separate building, reinforced to withstand explosions, will house volatile chemicals, said Kenneth Rogerson, one of a team of architects with the firm Leo A. Daly, designers of the complex.

About 100 students, scientists and university administrators applauded San Fernando Valley legislators who obtained state funding for the complex last year after it was rejected by Gov. George Deukmejian in 1985.

Bianchi and other science faculty wrote Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda) several years ago, describing the unsafe ventilation system, leaking plumbing and other problems.

At the ceremony, held on a lawn north of the existing science building, CSUN President James Cleary credited Katz with “pushing along the funding like it was his own building.”