On a late-October tour of the South Quad construction site, Sal Filardi pointed up at the three enormous steel skeletons before him and described to a group of hard-hatted student reporters the buildings they’re slated to become.
“There’s a lot of people like, ‘I won’t be here when they’re done,’” said Filardi, Quinnipiac University’s vice president for facilities and capital planning. “I know, but this raises the stature of Quinnipiac, and you’re always Quinnipiac.”
First proposed in February 2022, the $293 million undertaking — which officials began constructing in December after a lengthy series of meetings with the Hamden Planning and Zoning Commission — will include a residence hall, a new School of Business building and a general academic center.
Here’s an overview of what The Chronicle learned on its Oct. 23 tour of the construction site:
RESIDENCE HALL
Scheduled to open in time for the start of the fall 2024 semester next August — a full nine months before either academic building opens — the new residence hall is the most complete of the three South Quad skeletons.
Located just west of The Commons residence hall where the South Lot parking lot previously stood, the c-shaped dorm building will soon house 417 students. The residence hall’s north side overlooks the quad, meaning both the Arnold Bernhard Libary’s clock tower and the Sleeping Giant’s “belly button” — as Chief Experience Officer Tom Ellett described it — sit within eyeshot of the upper floors.
The new four-story residence hall will increase the Mount Carmel Campus’ housing capacity, which currently sits somewhere around 3,000 beds, by roughly 13%.
Architects separated each of the hall’s floors into three of what Filardi described as “RA units” — that is, roughly 30 student beds and a designated resident assistant room. Although single rooms will account for approximately 10% of student accommodations, Filardi said the building will comprise mostly double rooms.
Beyond student and RA accommodations, though, each of the 12 “units” will contain a lounge area.
“We’re trying to create a community here where students can engage with each other,” Ellett said. “There’s a lot of cross-community that can happen on the floor.”
Each floor will also contain three gender-neutral restroom pods.
“All gender-neutral is, is the ability for anybody to use it,” Filardi said, noting that the bathrooms prioritize privacy. “It gives us the opportunity that we could mix genders on the floor and have anybody use it.”
The bathrooms will feature a line of communal sinks on one wall and a series of private stalls — each containing a shower and a toilet — on the other. Unlike in the majority of communal residence hall bathrooms on campus, floor-to-ceiling walls and doors will separate each of the new residence hall’s restroom stalls.
Or, as Filardi put it, “you can’t peek under it.”
But each quasi-communal bathroom will also be flanked on either side by two entirely private bathrooms.
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Scheduled to open in May 2025, the School of Business’ new South Quad home is structurally complete, but envisioning the finer details requires some imagination.
“There’s not a whole lot to see on those buildings,” Filardi said of the business and general academic buildings. “You can see they’re kind of the skeleton of the structural steel.”
The building will feature around a dozen academic classrooms, including a handful of business-centric speciality spaces such as an innovation hub and a financial technology center.
Most of the building’s classrooms, Filardi said, will seat between 45 and 60 students — a notable upward shift from the campus’ current average classroom size.
“The 30-person classroom doesn’t work anymore,” Filardi said. “As we’re designing new buildings, we’re making sure that the classrooms are big enough to handle the changes in pedagogy that we’ve seen.”
The new building will also include a 150-seat auditorium and a main lobby area with a grab-and-go snack bar. The building’s second and third floors will contain faculty offices, study areas, meeting rooms and the dean’s suite.
The 79,000-square-foot building bordering New Road is slated to replace the aging Lender School of Business building. For perspective, the Lender building — which the business school shares with the School of Communications — clocks in at just over 44,000 square feet.
The university’s future plans for the Lender building are still unclear.
ACADEMIC CENTER
A general academic center will reside directly between the business school and the new residence hall, though this building is both the least complete and the most vague in its design.
The 137,000-square-foot behemoth was approximately 65% structurally complete when reporters toured in October, but Filardi said workers were preparing to lay the final beams.
The academic center — which will open alongside the School of Business at the end of the spring 2025 semester — will feature both wet and dry labs, new classrooms, group study spaces, faculty offices and a 700-seat auditorium.
“It’s good to see growth on campus,” said Jacob Cedor, a senior international business major and the president of Quinnipiac’s Student Government Association. “And it’s nice to see everything in kind of the framing stages here because you can start to picture everything and how it might look.”
Cedor knows he won’t be here when the South Quad opens. He knows he’ll never have the opportunity to use the new classrooms or sleep with Sleeping Giant out his dorm window. And he knows some students feel that Quinnipiac’s “University of the Future” campaign neglects the university of today, so to speak.
“There are obviously people who are skeptical, as people are skeptical of every decision that the university makes,” he said.
But like Filardi, he argued that Quinnipiac alumni will still benefit, even if only vicariously, from the university’s continued growth.
“This is just a really great thing to see as a student and as someone who will be an alumni in just a couple years,” Cedor said. “I think it benefits all of us when we’re gone that the campus and the community is still growing.”
