Georgia Southern's Central Warehouse will be central in its functions, but not in its geography.
The university's brand new warehouse will serve as the headquarters of its procurement and property control functions. It has climate-controlled museum and archeology repositories, electronically access-controlled official archives and even a costume shop.
The Chris R. Sheridan Company was designer-build contractor on the warehouse and office building, which had a $6.5 million construction budget and an overall $8 million project cost from design to furnishings. Completed last month, the 58,000-square-foot structure, at 375 Lanier Drive, south of the bypass, is the first to appear on a site envisioned as the new South Campus.
"Other than its location at the very back of the corner of the property, it's not positioned and located there to support what's going to be grown in the future over there," said GSU Vice President for Business and Finance Robert Whitaker. "It's really kind of the best location for that kind of facility for the entire university."
At least seven university departments will store materials in the building, and some will have personnel based there as well. The Procurement Department will be moving there from the Rosenwald Building.
The new warehouse also will house the Archives and Records Center, Equipment Transport Services, Central Receiving, Property Control and Surplus Control. Besides the museum and the archaeology program getting new storage spaces, another academic unit, the Communication Arts Department, has moved its costume shop to the warehouse, and is storing props as well as costumes, with access to the loading dock.
Also a workplace
Features such as a bicycle rack out front, offices, break areas a large conference rooms show this isn't just a storage building, but also a workplace. Before giving a reporter a tour, Sandi Wilkinson, project manager with the university's Facilities Planning, Design and Construction office, dismissed a suggestion that the warehouse might not be an exciting place to visit.
"It has turned out to be a beautiful building, and some of the storage shelving that they have in there is pretty exciting because it allows them to store quite a bit more in a smaller space," she said.
The archaeology repository and archives areas have moveable, high-density shelving. Mounted on rails, the stacks of shelves are cranked apart to create aisles as needed for access.
Storage rooms are humidity as well as temperature-controlled. The doors have access-control systems to record who enters and exits. Occupancy sensors turn the lights off when everyone has left a room.
Museum's uses
The Georgia Southern University Museum is using its area to store kits used for Project SENSE and Project BESST, the museum's science and social studies outreach programs to schools across southeastern Georgia.
Also, the warehouse gives the museum a place to store large items and traveling exhibits. Equipment Transport Services, the arm of the university responsible for moving things, is right there to bring them out when needed, said Dr. Brent Tharp, the museum's director
"We've got a loading dock," Tharp said. "We've never had a loading dock; we've always just been sort of lifting things up to move them in an out.... This also provides us oversized storage, which we've never had, and we have some key things in the collection, like the turpentine wagon from the 1920s, that we wanted to preserve."
As of Thursday, the wagon had not been placed in the warehouse. But a century-old floor safe emblazoned with the name of the university's original 1906 incarnation, the First District A&M School, was there, as was an even older, hand-cranked cotton gin. Tharp is looking to add a boat of a type designed by "Racer" Evans for the Ogeechee River in the early 20th century.
"I've always wanted one for the collection because it's such a distinctive style," Tharp said. "We've just never had a place where we could store something like that for otherse to research until it's on exhibit."
Benefits to archaeology
A press release from GSU Director of Communications Jennifer Wise quoted Dr. Jared Wood, an assistant professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department, about the importance of the new repository of archaeological artifacts.
"Archaeology is mostly shown as ‘the dig,' but rarely do we see what happens afterward to the artifacts and excavation records each project generates," Wood said. "Federal and state regulations, as well as our field's professional ethics, mandate that artifacts and records from archaeology projects have a permanent, safe home, managed by a curator."
Wood called the availability of the new space, "a truly exciting development" and said it should raise the profile of the university and its archaeology program by making materials available for student and faculty research and drawing visiting researchers.
In occupying the warehouse, the university is able to give up some leased buildings, such as the space at College Plaza now occupied by records and archives, and the building on U.S. Highway 301 that served as the costume shop.
South Campus
The warehouse also establishes a toehold of actual construction on South Campus.
With only about three viable sites for new construction remaining on the current main campus, university officials worked with architects to develop a master plan for the South Campus in 2015. Whitaker calls this "a high level, long-term, conceptual idea" based on projected needs but drawn up with no real consideration of the availability of funding.
The South Campus vision includes academic and research buildings, student housing and dining facilities, and - expected to be the most expensive - an arena that could replace Hanner Fieldhouse.
"Those are kind of like the wish list," Whitaker said. "Nothing is etched in stone at this point, except the warehouse being the first building, and as we have new buildings to get funded, we talk about the potential of putting them on the South Campus versus putting them on the internal campus."
Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.