Pardon our dust! How the Facilities team improved Northeastern’s campuses this summer
While many students, faculty and staff were away, the PREF department was busy at work on everything from residence hall paint touch-ups to a massive steam heating system.
For many of us who work and study across the Northeastern network, summer — when residence halls are empty, class sessions are short and beach vacations call — is the calm season. Unless you work in facilities.
For the approximately 400 staffers in the university’s Planning, Real Estate and Facilities (PREF) department — administrators, maintenance and construction workers, horticulturalists — the climbing temperatures indicate the start of a busy period tending to projects that are inaccessible the rest of the year. That includes smaller jobs like touching up paint, replacing furniture, landscaping and cleaning the koi pond.
“We’re taking care of everything you see, and everything you don’t,” says Angel Williams, PREF’s assistant vice president for strategic initiatives. “We take care of the buildings, and we make sure that you don’t have to think about them.”
But it’s also a season to make headway on major infrastructure projects, from new dining facilities to underground pipework for campus heating. In Boston, one of the biggest endeavors currently underway involves laying the groundwork for increased energy efficiency in the future multi-purpose athletics and recreation complex at the site of Matthews Arena.
“We just started the geothermal wells for the new Matthews project,” Williams says.
Via a series of holes drilled deep into the ground, geothermal well systems make use of the stable temperatures beneath the Earth’s surface to reduce energy costs and reliance on fossil fuels. This helps with heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.
“It’s an exciting thing for the future of our infrastructure,” Williams says. In addition to making the new complex more energy efficient, “tying into those wells will open up the possibility of doing some micro-gridding and other things within that area of campus,” she notes.
What’s new?
Students, faculty and staff returning to the Boston campus for the fall will notice a few other major additions once the barricades and “Pardon our dust” signs come down. (Browse the full list of projects here.)The residence hall at 60 Belvidere has a new dining location and market; the ambitious restoration of the stained glass windows at the Fenway Center is nearly completed. Facilities keeps a careful schedule of the offices, residences and common areas to update each summer.
“There’s always something in Curry being refreshed. Last year was the ballroom,” Williams says. “In the past we’ve worked one-by-one through the West Villages.”
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One of the summer’s biggest projects, however, isn’t even visible: The ongoing replacement of the vast underground system of metal pipes that pump steam heat to all the buildings on campus. Glimpses of the subterranean construction work have been visible along Huntington Avenue.
“There’s a much larger plan related to the steam infrastructure — we’ll have our steam outsourced instead of producing it on campus,” Williams says — a big change for a campus with a steam stack sitting squarely at its center.
“It’s great because it gives us an opportunity to have clean steam in the future. It’s one of the things we can do to [make campus] a little more resilient.”
Around the network
Befitting Northeastern, Facilities is a global department. On the Oakland campus, the makerspace is getting expanded and refreshed. Workers undertake the same building touch-ups as in Boston, along with landscaping unique to the West Coast campus, like cleaning up the creek that runs through its center.
The summer meant progress on new buildings and student spaces in London (which opened two new floors in its 1 Portsoken location) and Toronto (which outfitted new floors in its building on 375 Queen St.). In Manhattan, team members spent the summer preparing for the first cohort of New York City Scholars on the Marymount Manhattan College campus with updated signage and classroom equipment.
“We have so many people doing so many different kinds of jobs,” Williams says. “With all of the campuses, frankly, we have a hand in everything.”