Cam Enarson, who is leading the project as senior vice president of Carolina Value in the School of Medicine, said the new building will be located in the back of the current Berryhill Hall. He said the walkway from South Columbia Street into Berryhill is going to be renovated as part of the project as well.
“So what’s going to happen, it’s going to be a two-stage construction process, the first phase that the new building will be built in the back of the current Berryhill Hall and then the current Berryhill structure will come down and then the second phase of the building will go up.” Enarson said.
The Connect NC bond, passed in March 2016, gave the medical school $68 million for the building. Enarson said he’s not sure how much the new building will ultimately cost.
Rob Kark, who oversees the School of Medicine’s planning and construction office as assistant dean for planning, said the designs will probably be completed in the summer of 2018, and construction is anticipated to begin in the spring of 2019. Enarson said the first phase is expected to be completed by late 2020, and the second phase will be completed by the end of 2022.
“Our class size now for the medical school is ... 180 per year and the vast majority of the students come from North Carolina. We’ve been approved like almost 10 years ago now ... by the Board of Governors to increase the class size to 230, but we’ve been limited by facility as well as financing so the building is being built to accommodate, you know, the approved class size of 230,” Enarson said.
Julie Byerley, vice dean for education at the School of Medicine, said aside from the fact that it would give the opportunity to expand the medical school class size, the new building also supports the school’s incentive to modernize some of its teaching and learning techniques.
“There are very few windows in Berryhill, and some say that it’s because Berryhill was built at a time where for people to learn best — it was thought that the best thing to do was to isolate them and not interrupt them and put them in places where all they did was science and study,” Byerley said.
She said the new building will have more spaces for active learning and spaces for interactive small groups and a lot of individualized study spaces for students, along with more windows.
