School of Informatics opens new building

The new building for the School of Informatics, called Informatics East, almost didn’t make it to its present-day existence.

Plans to renovate the former Beta Theta Pi fraternity house ran into an array of funding and hidden condition issues, said Pete Bucklin, director of Information Technology and Director of Facilities.

Things were so bad, Bucklin said, the architects working on the building deemed it the worst project they had ever worked on in the history of their careers.

The School of Informatics was able to see its dream come to life Friday evening with the grand opening of Informatics East.

Donors, the dean’s advisory council and an architectural team all contributed to creating the best product with limited resources, Bucklin said.

“It feels awesome. It really does,” Bucklin said. “To be able to work with the people I was able to work with. This has turned out better than I think anybody that saw this to start with or has worked on this project could have imagined, and that feels good.”

Informatics East is an additional building next door to the original School of Informatics on the corner of 10th Street and Woodlawn Avenue. Informatics East was created to consolidate the school and to create much-needed space for students and faculty, said Robert Schnabel, dean of the School of Informatics.

“Not only does it bring everyone together, but it creates space to work and interact with everybody,” said Laura Brunetti, a second-year master’s student in the Human Computer Interactions Design program.

The new building also lives up to the vision cast by the school’s leaders, who wanted to see it become a welcoming place for students, Schnabel said.

“It gives us a really attractive headquarters for the school, which I just think is important to the spirit of the school,” he said. “It gives us a student-friendly headquarters that we didn’t have before.”

The first floor of the new structure offers an area for career services, which is an expansion from its previous location in the original informatics building.

It also contains a cafe run by Residential Programs and Services that is connected to a student lounge.

Down the hallway from the lounge are the only two classrooms in the building. The second and third floors consist of offices and open graduate student space to study and work.

“They needed this building because of the growth of the faculty and the growth in enrollment, and they are also wrapping up research activity,” said IU Provost Karen Hanson.

Mayor Mark Kruzan was asked to attend the grand opening event as part of the school’s strategic plan to contribute to economics within the state of Indiana, said Lisa Herrmann, manager of communications for the IU School of Informatics.

“The School of Informatics has already engaged itself as a part of our local economic development scene,” Kruzan said. “This school is going to be very literally helping to provide jobs for people – students here – but also creating jobs that are going to benefit the local economy.”