New Buildings Start Taking Shape at College

The math: $12.4 million. The physics: up.

A little more than three months after work began on Ventura College’s trio of math, chemistry, physics and biology buildings, the 60,000-square-foot complex is beginning to take shape.

“Basically we’re going along very well,” said Robert Forest, the college’s director of maintenance and operations. “The dirt work is done, the cement is going in and the next thing will be standing up the steel structure . . . . Within the next two weeks the building will appear to jump in place fairly quick.”

The project will provide as many as 70 jobs during certain phases of construction in the coming months, said Bill Edwards, job site superintendent with the general contractor, Atkinson and Associates in Lancaster.

When the buildings open for classes in the fall of 1997, they will be the first new structures dedicated solely to classroom space to be built on campus in the last 20 years.

The lone three-story building and pair of two-story structures will replace old biology and chemistry labs built in 1953 that were intended for a 20-year lifetime, Forest said. Also scheduled to be demolished are two World War II era barracks still in use.