Vision 2025: One building going up and another going down

Oklahoma State University broke ground Tuesday on a $30-million building from the Vision 2025 program. And crews demolished the biggest building in the path of the new arena. <br/><br/>News on Six reporter

Tuesday, December 14th 2004, 10:15 am

By: News On 6

Oklahoma State University broke ground Tuesday on a $30-million building from the Vision 2025 program. And crews demolished the biggest building in the path of the new arena.

News on Six reporter Emory Bryan has new developments on the Vision plan.

The leadership of OSU planted a shovel to put down some deeper roots on their Tulsa campus. The groundbreaking is for a laboratory and classroom building build partly with money from the Vision plan.

David Schmidly, OSU President: â€œWhat I'm hoping with this building is we're going to bring graduate education and engineering over here and going to have research in this building and both are important to Tulsa because they will help economic development."

The first phase of the building is projected to cost $30-million. OSU plans to hire engineers to work with advanced composites and other emerging technologies. They'll train up to 45 graduate students.

The plan is to build the kind of laboratories that can make the campus a center of research. Gary Trennepohl, OSU Tulsa President: "We want programs over here that relate, but don't duplicate, so we'll have engineering programs over here that make sense for northeast Oklahoma.â€

The OSU building will take 2 years to complete.

And work is well underway on the biggest Vision project of them all. They're making room for the arena, demolition is continuing, and will take another couple of months.

It's the biggest building demolished so far on the arena site. The old Stowes Office Furniture building has been leveled, and the site will be cleared within days.

The city wants all of the buildings cleared for the arena by February.

The second phase of the OSU building depends on money from the state that's not yet been approved.