Brand New Buildings?

So for those of you who don't know, I work at Arizona State University and I work in the architects office. Today we took a tour of the "NEW" GIOS building. GIOS stands for Global Institute of Sustainability. It looks really nice on the inside but the outside, well lets just say it looked dated, and I'll tell you why. It seems that the University loves to save money by taking their old buildings and just gutting them inside and redoing the inside. For the GIOS Building, which used to be the old Nursing building, they gutted the whole inside and spent a little over 9 Million Dollars renovating the inside. You'd think for 9 Million it would be sparkling diamonds inside, well it's not. In fact it looks just like most other buildings on campus inside.


So...Let me get this straight, we take the old building.... gut it...... spend 9 Million.......just so it can look pretty much like it did before we gutted it. Right.

I'm all for progress on campus but when you keep the old outside of a building just to save some cash. I personally think that's a little tacky. The outside of GIOS is old and dated and many of the metal siding and finishes are coming up and falling off. I'm sorry but you just can't have a grand opening for a building that is not new and doesn't even look new on the outside. It would have been great for them to keep all the original brick and sand blast them or paint them to give a nice new finish.

Well needless to say I'm disappointed that the University spends so much, just to have the building pretty much exactly how it was before and then to call it new. Not renovated, New.

Oh well, I suppose when you have that much money to throw around you can pretty much make whatever inane and redundant decisions that you want to.