After a year of delays, a year of walking back and forth to the T-Building, and a year of trying to find the bookstore, the remodeled Gaiser Hall is open. Although, when I say open, I mean that the doors aren't locked. There still aren’t any services in the building. In fact, the only reason why anyone would be in the building is the bookstore, which has its newest entrance in the remodeled hall.
What's more, the dust hasn't even settled and the ASCC is planning to start this entire construction thing again. In winter quarter, there was a vote to decide if students wanted to fund a redesign of Gaiser Auditorium. Out of the 12,000 students registered at Clark, only a handful of people voted and decided where all our money is going. So, once we get used to parking where we'd like and without seeing fences everywhere, the caution tape will go up again.
The school needs to calm down a bit. They're really enthusiastic about starting projects, but not so much about finishing them. They told us that all the construction on campus would be done by January. Here we are, in March, and still neither Gaiser nor O'Connell is fully functional. I'm sure that when the Auditorium moves up on the To-Do list, we'll get an optimistic finish date that'll be missed by a quarter or two.
What I don't understand is why wasn't any potential remodel of Gaiser Auditorium originally included with the overall construction? I guess no one really thought that it might be a good idea to do things in the same general time rather than one after the other. This will cause the same problems that we had with Gaiser Hall: restricted parking, blocked off passages and a stream of delays that always seem to happen. Instead of starting up a new project, before the old one is finished, we should take a minute to step back and see what works and what doesn't. If the students find some flaw in the remodel of Gaiser, the College should listen to them before they knock something else down.
But, with all the delays, the large cost, and the disruption caused to students, the building looks absolutely beautiful. The large openings and glass walls work well with the rest of the school. Clark has this standing ambition for making the campus look its best. Clark College is one of the most beautiful places in the Vancouver, and the Administration wants to expand on that. It's also helpful that they're not moving services during the actual quarter, as that would severely disrupt the flow. My most optimistic idea is that the T-Building services would start moving to Gaiser Hall during summer, and finishing before fall. That way, new students wouldn't be more confused than usual.
The ambitions of the College are what keep us one of the best schools in the area, and certainly the best looking. But if we sacrifice function for form, we lose the very purpose of what we're doing here. This is a community college, a place of higher learning, not a pile of building blocks to be knocked down every once and a while.
