Penn State's planners did not take the summer off.

They put their pens to the drawing paper and sketched out the future of University Park's West Campus, the area opposite North Atherton Street from the Walker Building.

"It is, be prepared, somewhat radical," said university architect Eliza Pennypacker, introducing the plans at a State College Borough Council meeting last week.

The most radical part of the project is a massive new technology building that will arc over four lanes of traffic.

Plans also call for adding graduate student apartments, parking spaces and new traffic patterns to the West Campus, which is already home to several engineering buildings and a bus terminal.

For the immediate future, the plan will mean several years of construction and detours. Although there are still changes possible to the plan, planner Joe Hibbard of Sasaki Associates of Watertown, Mass. explained what will probably happen next.

The first project — adding 200 apartments for graduate students and their families, plus a commons building — is scheduled to run from spring 2001 to fall 2002.

Also in spring 2001, a new stretch of Curtin Road will open between the Nittany Lion Shrine and North Atherton Street, near Rec Hall. This will help redirect traffic from the Pollock Road-Atherton Street intersection, which will be closed.

Between fall 2001 and fall 2003, a new technology building will take shape about 16 feet above North Atherton Street.

The new structure will house the School of Information Sciences and Technology and the department of computer science and engineering.

A scale model of the campus on display at the meeting depicts the IST building as a gently curved building about three times as long as Old Main. The flat, graceful building wraps around a 900-foot-long outdoor footpath that will replace part of Pollock Road.

One architectural sketch shows the walkway pouring out of the building like a 30-foot-wide tongue.

Leonard Perfido, one of the building's architects, explained that the bridge will be designed to seem like the easiest way to cross North Atherton Street by bike or on foot.

"It's important that it's outside. It's important that you don't have to open a door," Perfido said.

Hibbard and Pennypacker called the building "campus crossing." Perfido and other architects have nicknamed the design the "Ponte Vecchio," after a medieval river-spanning building in Florence, Italy.

The floorplans for the IST building — how many classrooms and how big they'll be, for example — are still in the works. Perfido mentioned a few specific details: the building will have 160,000 square feet of space, with a sky-lit atrium and a café.

It's still too early to know how the construction of the bridge will affect traffic on North Atherton Street, said Dick Tennent, project manager for the IST building.

Pennypacker also stressed that the plans are still in rough draft form.

Penn State officials declined to release copies of the drawings for publication in the newspaper.

Even the meeting itself was limited to informational questions, not comments. But that didn't stop several spectators from giving unsolicited feedback, both positive and negative.

Several said the design will make an already-congested area even worse.

"They're putting 10 pounds of manure in a five-pound bag," said Regis Kingera (sophomore-labor and industrial relations), a retired electrician attending Penn State as an undergraduate student. Kingera wondered why the university didn't build the IST building near the Penn State Research Park, where there's more space.

Others were excited about the IST building, a building so unique that it could become a State College landmark.

"This building will help put Penn State as a leader in the nation — in the world — in information technology," said Dave Thompson, who works as an engineer in State College.