Students at Central Piedmont Community College’s central campus will get their first look Tuesday at a new library, theater and student union building.
The new Parr Center encompasses 183,000 square feet, with lots of windows and patios offering views of campus and the uptown Charlotte skyline. It was designed by Morris Berg and Moody Nolan Architects and built by Rodgers and R.J. Leeper Construction.
Jeff Lowrance, vice president for communications, describes it as a new front door to the campus.
The building updates the library, replaces the old Pease Auditorium with a 450-seat theater and gives the school its first real student union.
"It offers our first-ever true dining services on the campus," Lowrance said. "Before we’ve had things like Subway and Bojangles and Sbarro, but this will be a place where students can come and get a hot meal and sit down and eat."
Lowrance says the school’s demographics have shifted toward younger people, including high school students and recent graduates. Once it served mostly adults who took a class and returned to work, he said.
"But we have more students who come and are actually here all day long. So they need a space where they can come and sit down between classes, relax, meet, have student organization meetings, study, those sorts of things," he said.
In 2013 Mecklenburg County voters approved $210 million for 10 projects on the college’s six campuses. Lowrance says the Parr Center, which cost $113 million, was funded partly by that money.
