UA Preserves The Union

Workers put old face on 26-year-old building

The $15.9 million renovation of the Arkansas Union building on the University of Arkansas campus is scheduled to be completed by the time fall classes begin in late August, but Jay Huneycutt thinks it may be early September before it’s finished.

Huneycutt, the UA’s associate director for contracted services and a landscape architect for the physical plant, said on July 21 that the renovation was 90 percent complete. Work was still being done on the fifth-floor ballroom and a 36,000-SF addition on the east side of the building, he said.

The project included renovating some 112,000 SF of the 170,000-SF, six-story Union building and constructing the addition that will serve as a new facade facing Mullins Library.

Huneycutt says the new front was designed to resemble Memorial Hall, a 59,750-SF cut-stone building on campus that was constructed in 1939 as the first student union. The current renovation began in January 1998. It is the first full-renovation of the Arkansas Union, which was built in 1973.

The addition was designed by Polk Stanley Saunders architects of Little Rock. Architects for the renovation were McGowan Anderson Hunter Griffin of Fort Smith. Kinco Inc. Contractors of Springdale and Little Rock is the general contractor.

The two-story addition will house student government offices, a computer lab, convenience store, video rental store and coffee shop.

To make room for the new addition, workers had to remove the Chi Omega fountain and Delta Delta Delta clock from the plaza in front of Union along with four years of senior walk – 1974 through 1977. The fountain and clock, which were donated by the respective sororities, will be reconstructed about 40 to 50 feet closer to the library, Huneycutt says. The senior walk will be replaced in the same area between the Union and the library.