PE Building Nears Completion at CSUN

Featuring state-of-the-art laboratories, faculty offices and a new gymnasium, a $10-million addition to Cal State Northridge’s Physical Education Building is nearing completion and should be ready for classes in the fall.

It couldn’t have arrived at a better time, said Don Bethe, chairman of CSUN’s kinesiology department, which will begin occupying the two-story facility over the next several weeks.

“There’s mass excitement on the part of the faculty,” he said. “We’re really looking forward to this.”

Proposed almost 30 years ago, the expansion will nearly double the size of the university’s 34-year-old Physical Education Building. After enrollment projections in the 1980s showed a future need for more space, the project finally began to take shape in 1989 and has been funded by four state bonds.

Construction began in September 1994 and should be finished by late August, Bethe said. The fall semester will begin on Aug. 26.

Included in the new building are six laboratories devoted to exercise physiology, biomechanics, sports medicine, sports psychology, motor development and movement education. Also opening this fall are a graduate student research lab, two dance studios and an instructional gym. A new computer lab is already in use for a summer class.

“The discipline has changed dramatically,” Bethe said, noting that in many ways the new facilities are indicative of the ways that physical education has moved away from a focus on athletics to a broader study of human movement.

In a simpler sense, Bethe noted that the bright, spacious addition is also a tremendous morale lifter for the nearly five dozen full- and part-time faculty members who teach in the department.

“I think it looks good. It goes beyond the traditional notion of a state building,” he said.