At the HEART

“We shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill once remarked. “Thereafter, they shape us.”

SIR WINSTON’S OBSERVATION comes to mind with the reopening last November of the University Center, the brick-and-mortar heart of the Seton Hall campus, following a two-year, top-to-bottom renovation. The revamping of the 60-year-old building, undertaken by the Trenton architectural firm Clarke Caton Hintz, was designed to align with the University’s strategic plan, Harvest Our Treasures, which seeks to provide students with “a premier, mission-centered engagement experience.” The project’s chief planners purposely sought to create spaces within the thoroughly modernized building that would invite engagements large and small, planned and unplanned, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“We’re literally tearing down walls and opening doors to invite more collaboration, engagement and cross pollination of ideas, in and outside the classroom,” Seton

Hall President Joseph E. Nyre announced in a recent communication about the project. “Just like our students are at the heart of our mission, the newly renovated University Center will advance the heart of our campus.”

From an early-morning cup of joe at the new, openall-day Starbucks to midday lectures and luncheons in the 500-seat Event Room, to late-night study sessions in the Pirate Cove, members of the Seton Hall community now have round-the-clock access to the University Center. Students took advantage of the building’s expanded hours almost immediately. With fall semester finals fast approaching, nightfall found more students spending more study time in the University Center, some staying into the early morning.

It was just the sort of appeal that University planners, including Victoria Pivovarnick, had in mind. As the associate vice president for facilities engineering and business affairs, Pivovarnick, now in her seventh year at Seton Hall, oversees capital projects on campus. The wholesale remodeling of the University Center ranks as