It was unbearably cold when I began my tour of Gilman and its ongoing renovations last Wednesday morning - even colder inside the building than out. I was quickly struck by the true extent of the project when, climbing a staircase to the third floor, Project Superintendent Eddie Delluomo said casually, "Good thing you came today; all these staircases are coming out in a week."
I glanced down at the steps beneath me, irrationally afraid that they might decide to demolish themselves early at the suggestion of their disappearance.
From the outside, Gilman appears much as it ever did. Although the building is covered in scaffolding, surrounded by workmen and emitting more noise than it used to, it has remained unchanged over the course of construction in all its outward essentials.
On the inside, though, it is the proverbial whole new world.
Gilman is in the midst of what Delluomo calls the dismantling phase of construction. As far as I can tell, this means Gilman's interior will continue to resemble a dusty, labyrinthine concrete wasteland, an otherworld rife with temporary staircases and plywood dividers.
Gutted, the building is practically unrecognizable to someone who spent many happy hours searching its hallways for offices and bathrooms in the past. Unless you make for a window and attempt to orient yourself using the outside world, there are virtually no remaining points of reference within the building itself.
Gone are the somewhat seedy, yellowed hallways, the two central stairwells, the endless bulletin boards and the dilapidated elevator. Gone are the vending machines, the leather couches, the bridge connecting the entryway and the HUT and the sunken bookstore.
It's not just that Gilman has been filled with workers and jackhammers or that the center of the building is being entirely restructured. It's that the landscape of Gilman has been so entirely changed that it's almost impossible to superimpose the past on the present, and more difficult still to imagine the future.
Gilman's new centerpiece, not yet installed, will be the vast glass atrium intended to inhabit the previously open space around which the building was constructed. It won't be making an appearance in the construction process until this fall, but preparations are being made for its arrival.
The bridge which used to connect the entryway and the HUT has finally been removed, and the doors on either side of that great gap exist now in lonely, currently useless, Tyveked said.
The plan is to construct the new Gilman around a unifying central space - the atrium. On the first floor, the atrium will house a University archeology exhibition, and on the second floor an open platform will reconnect the entryway and the HUT. From that platform, you'll be able to peer over a railing at any archeology fans perusing the collection beneath - or look up through two stories of empty space to a skylight and, beyond it, the sky itself.
For Fred Puddester, the senior associate dean for Finance and Administration and my second tour guide, the renovation seems to be all about this centrality and a more straightforward utilization of the space Gilman has to provide.
As we walked across the fourth floor, I gazed through windows in the plywood at the great empty spaces that Gilman's two main central stairwells used to occupy.
Puddester gestured at a nearby hub of construction activity and said, "This is where the book stacks used to be. When we're done, this will hold offices and seminar rooms - we've recaptured the space."
Gilman must have been holding a lot of space captive - its retrieval came up a number of times on my tour. I couldn't help thinking of the renovation itself as a hostage rescue situation - a sort of decriminalization of what is our campus's greatest building.
Just beneath the space where the bookstore once was, in a pit dug especially to hold Gilman's mechanical guts, the heating and cooling units finally arrived and were installed just before Christmas. Now workers are beginning to run the piping that will one day provide us with hot and cold water in a currently frigid building.
And just above those machines, replacing the old bookstore, a new floor has been constructed for what will eventually be Gilman's largest classroom - a lecture hall designed to seat about 135 students.
But as a new classroom begins to emerge in the heart of Gilman's ravaged landscape, another must be lost, one would think, to compensate. When Gilman reopens, the famed Gilman 500 will be no more, its handicapped inaccessibility finally a problem impossible to overlook. Instead, the classroom beneath it will be two stories tall, and stairs leading up to the bell tower will wrap around the walls of the seminar room.
And in the bell tower, while the historic clock mechanics will be preserved, the equally historical graffiti will doubtless be removed. Goodbye, "Bob Marley 1969." You were meaningful while you lasted.
The HUT, too, will have changed when Gilman finally reopens. It has already changed, although not permanently. At present, it's been stripped of all its trappings. Its stained glass windows have been shipped away for professional restoration off site, and it's all cold concrete. The goal is to keep the HUT looking essentially the same, although its two study wings will be separated from the central rounded room by glass paneling.
And the furniture, of course, will have been replaced, although according to Puddester, "Less than five percent of what's been removed from the building is rubbish. All the material gets taken out and recycled."
We could have the old stuff back, then, I guess - I suspect, however, that we won't be seeing those pen-stained tables any time soon. No great loss, although I'd like to know what they've done with Gilman's glorious studded leather couches.
Gilman's two spiral staircases have long-since been removed, but will be replaced with similar staircases spiraling up to the second floor and more traditional connected staircases leading up to the third and fourth floors. One more staircase will be constructed in the building, more centrally located near the HUT.
By Gilman's interior standards, the exterior of the building will get off easy.
"We'll be doing a little roofwork, installing new copper roofing, but the building will have the same look it always had," Delluomo said. "The exterior is historic, and we want it to remain identical."
A little spit and polish is in order, though - Gilman's exterior will be washed and repainted in places. Work will be done on the columns and portico of the building's entrance, but those repairs will be nothing compared to the carnage being wrought upon the interior.
According to Delluomo, workers will be dismantling the building through to the fall of 2009, which means the plywood and the great gaping holes will remain prominent features. But it's not all destruction inside Gilman.
"The new is passing the old on a daily basis," Delluomo said.
While the new building sounds like it will be infinitely more functional and aesthetically pleasing, workers have no plans to re-include some of Gilman's once notorious features. Our asbestos, for example, has gone the way of the Dodo - and will be seen no more.
Puddester said that the project is on schedule and on budget.
"I meet with the department chairs monthly - I'm meeting with them today, actually - and they always ask that," Puddester said. "Luckily, I've always been able to give them the same answer."
According to Puddester, Gilman should open its doors in the summer of 2010, when the faculty members so recently dispatched to Dell House will begin the process of schlepping their stores of stuff back to campus.
