University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

School of Nursing Dean Jean Brown offers a tour of renovated Wende Hall. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

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• “Faculty will be closer together, and I think that’s going to be a real plus. We also have a little bit of room to grow.”

  Jean Brown

  Dean, UB School of Nursing

By CHARLOTTE HSU

Published: August 26, 2009

Elegant, aged architecture and cutting-edge technology are coming together in Wende Hall, South Campus, to form the new home for UB’s growing School of Nursing.

With its stone facade, the historic building constructed in 1885 and expanded in 1955 will become part of the school’s identity, providing nursing programs with space they can call their own after more than 30 years in the upper stories of Kimball Tower, a former South Campus residence hall.

To prepare for its new occupants, Wende Hall received a $7.1 million renovation, starting in 2008, that has made it more user-friendly and energy-efficient. The facility includes state-of-the-art classrooms, instructional laboratories and research space, along with new elevator, air conditioning and heating systems, four new restrooms and motion-activated light fixtures that can be dimmed in individual offices to save power.

Faculty and staff, such as student affairs employees, are moving in this summer, with some already occupying their new offices. Dean Jean Brown will have her offices in nearby Beck Hall. Classes for the fall semester will begin in Kimball and relocate to Wende as workers put the finishing touches on teaching spaces in the building, which will house seven classrooms, a center for nursing research, three specialized instructional laboratories, faculty offices and student and employee lounges.

“We had completely run out of space in Kimball Tower,” Brown says. “There was no space for new faculty or new research projects. We were just very crammed in there. Kimball Tower, with its long hallways, was built as a dormitory, so it did not enhance faculty collaboration.”

In Wende, which has 76,170 square feet of space, Brown says, “faculty will be closer together, and I think that’s going to be a real plus. We also have a little bit of room to grow.”

The building will feature a clinical skills laboratory with nine hospital beds separated by curtains. Each workstation comes with a set of equipment for such tasks as suctioning and delivering oxygen. Students can further hone their nursing skills in two simulation rooms in the laboratory that house mannequins capable of exhibiting “symptoms” of illnesses.

A high-tech physical assessment laboratory will include 10 exams rooms, each twice the size of the spaces the School of Nursing used in Kimball Tower, Brown says. Each room will be equipped with cameras, enabling faculty members to converse with students and watch and record them at work. Students can then review and learn from their recordings.

An operating suite for the school’s anesthesia program will come equipped with a simulation mannequin. From a “mission control” room next door, faculty members will be able to monitor students, manipulating the mannequin to respond to their actions.

The School of Public Health and Health Professions, which is headquartered in Kimball Tower, will take over much of the space the School of Nursing is vacating in that building, says Kevin Thompson, director of facilities planning and design. Wende’s previous occupants, including employees from the Division of Development and Alumni Relations, have already moved to other UB buildings.