12/02/08

21:00 I attended a meeting of 'Brown Students for Barack Obama' that was taking place in RI Hall 201. The classroom was a good size for the 60 or so people who showed up, but it is another example of how RI Hall is just being used as extra space. The rest of the building was dark, and it had obviously been kept open this late to accommodate events that couldn't find other spaces on campus.

14/02/08

13:00 I emailed Chad Cavanaugh at the Facilities Plan Room yesterday to enquire about accessing the ground plans of Rhode Island Hall, and was told that it was where they were kept, and that I was welcome to stop by. I made the trek out to the Facilities building behind the athletic fields, and was able to visit the Plan Room. It is a space that holds all the plans for all the buildings on campus, and concerns itself with all the current alterations and renovations happening on campus, as well as having an archive of ground plans. The first ground plans that I was given are the ones from the most recent major alteration that was the restoration of the exterior in 1995/6. The drawings contained a wealth of information about all the work that was carried out on the exterior, and might be very useful to the architectural firm responsible for the building, exterior renovation happening this time around. While these plans were very interesting, they were not the older plans I was hoping for. Upon enquiring further about the ground plans available, I was able to sort through all the existing past plans that the Plan Room holds. The earliest ones available were from the first major addition that was made in 1873. There were then a variety of plans dating from 1904, 1930, 1948, 1956, the 1960s, 1979, the 1980s, and 1991. I don't know how comprehensive this collection is, and there are probably drawings from other dates that were not passed onto Brown University. Certainly at least one set are missing, because there are not plans for the original Bucklin design of the 1830s. Also not all the plans held here were actually carried out. The designs from 1956 must have been proposed plans that were not implemented, as they show the relocation of the staircase to the centre of the building and the installation of bathrooms where the staircase is at the moment. I photocopied a few select plans as a sample of what the plan room had, and took them back to the Joukowsky Institute.

notebook- spring 2008