Post Office to move as Brown prepares to build new Life Sciences Building

The U.S. Post Office now located at 201 Meeting St. will move to 306 Thayer St. during the weekend of Oct. 6-8, 2001. Demolition of the former site will make way for construction of Brown University’s new Life Sciences Building. Brown owns both buildings.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In a move that will make way for construction of a new Life Sciences Building on the Brown University campus, the U.S. Post Office at 201 Meeting St. will close Oct. 6 and will reopen Oct. 9 in a Brown-owned building at 306 Thayer St.

Brown will demolish the Meeting Street post office as well as the nearby building at 185 Meeting St., which formerly housed the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. The University owns both buildings.

Construction of the Life Sciences Building is scheduled to begin in early November. Work will last for two years on a site bounded by Meeting and Olive streets between Thayer and Brown streets.

In the fourth week of October, Meeting and Olive streets will close between Thayer and Brown, and traffic will be rerouted. Trailers will be installed at the construction site, along with fences, signs and concrete traffic barriers.

In addition, occupants of the Philip Andrews Building at 60 Olive St., home to Brown’s Office of Facilities Management, will relocate, and the adjacent parking lot will close. The building and the parking lot are slated for eventual demolition.

To compensate, the University will expand its Lot 3, at Bowen and Brook streets, from 14 to 53 spaces. The expansion will be finished by the end of October.

The $94-million Life Sciences Building, which will rise adjacent to the current complex of biomedical buildings, will house the departments of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry; Neuroscience; Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences; and the interdisciplinary Brain Sciences program. The building will also contain new space for interdisciplinary initiatives in genetics and genomics.

The project will modernize and expand laboratory and research space at Brown. It will be designed to encourage scientific collaboration among faculty; staff and students by uniting complimentary research under one roof.

Current plans call for a 186,000-square-foot structure that will create more than 60 new laboratories. This will increase overall biomedical research space on campus by 50 percent. About 53 faculty members will relocate to the Life Sciences Building, and as many as 11 new faculty members will be added during the next few years.

Ballinger, an architectural and design firm located in Philadelphia, is designing the structure. Gilbane Building Company of Providence will construct it.

Relocation of departments to the building will free space elsewhere on campus. This will allow the University to consolidate faculty of the Public Health Institute and unite faculty of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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