Students Return to Construction Zone as UC Irvine Campus Grows

Stands of pine and eucalyptus rise from the rolling hills of Aldrich Park, an oasis of natural beauty at the heart of UC Irvine’s sprawling campus.

Yet serenity is missing from the postcard-perfect scene: You can see plenty of leaves, but you can’t hear them rustle. Instead, a chorus of power saws, jackhammers and clanging metal surrounds the park, a constant accompaniment to the concrete and steel skeletons of the new university buildings taking shape just outside the green.

“Everything is a construction zone,” said Haile Clay, 20, a drama major who chose UCI over UCLA two years ago because the wooded campus reminded him of his home in Northern California. “It’s unsettling. This used to be a peaceful place, and now all you hear are jackhammers.”

Welcome to UCI, the fastest-growing campus in the University of California system. Never has UCI’s unofficial acronym--”Under Construction Indefinitely”--seemed more fitting.

A record 16,400 students will converge on the campus for the start of classes today in the midst of a five-year construction program.

This $300-million building boom, evidenced in a dozen construction sites on the 1,510-acre campus, dwarfs the 25-year-old university’s start-up construction budget of $22 million.

When the buildings now under construction are complete, 1 million square feet of space will have been added. These include the $45-million Biological Sciences II hall, the most expensive building on campus; the bow-faced Physical Sciences II building, which will cost $32.5 million and more than double the space for the College of Physical Sciences, and the long-awaited University Center expansion, a $24.5-million project paid for with student fees.

Yet all this building will do little more than ease the crowding of recent years. The next phase of construction, now just a group of roughly sketched rectangles on a planning map, will prepare the campus for an anticipated 26,500 students in 2005.

“There will be nearly twice as much (construction) in the next 20 years as we have built in the last 20 years,” Chancellor Jack W. Peltason told the UC Board of Regents last week.

Much Growing to Do

Peltason, who has compared the university to an adolescent with much growing to do before reaching maturity, estimated that 7.4 million square feet of space would be needed; a total of 2.7 million square feet is already there, under construction and on the drawing boards.

The class of 1990 will see only a small measure of relief.

Students will be returning to a campus enlarged by a Physical Sciences lecture hall that opened late last spring, new dance and drama rehearsal studios and about 10 new classrooms. In addition, the Science lecture hall will be back in business after having undergone sprucing up, and only two theaters at the Edwards Cinema next door will have to be rented for additional lecture space instead of the three that were last year. A multilevel parking structure is scheduled to be completed in February. In the meantime, students, faculty and staff members will have to get by with 7,700 parking places--800 fewer than a year ago.

“It’s a mess,” said Nancy Wilson, 21, a part-time juggler and full-time social sciences major. “The worst part for me is the constant construction noise. If you’re outside trying to relax or study or eat lunch, you can’t get away from it.”

Commuting from her Tustin home is the easy part, Wilson said. “Parking is crazy. It takes me a half-hour to get to campus and another 45 minutes to an hour to find a parking space.”

Taking It in Stride

Several other students who were on campus last week to move into dormitories and apartments and make last-minute class schedule adjustments said they are taking the construction in stride.

“It’s encouraging to see buildings going up to improve the university,” said Robert Soper, a 19-year-old sophomore from Fallbrook. Soper, a biology major, will take many of his classes this fall in the busiest construction zone, the triangle of the Engineering, Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences buildings.

“You can’t really hear the noise if you’re inside,” Soper said. “And if we don’t really have a campus hangout because the University Center isn’t done, that just makes the atmosphere more conducive to study.”

Debra Burdick, a graduate student in molecular biology and biochemistry, said she was warned before arriving at UCI from New York that “there would be lots of construction” this school year.

“It’s a lot different from northern New York,” Burdick said. “Getting around the construction will be the least of my adjustments.”