Within a few years, a new development will greet visitors of State College who drive into town on College Avenue, and it won't be a Hooters restaurant.

Penn State's Board of Trustees approved preliminary sketch plans for new undergraduate housing during its meeting Friday. The design will be the new Eastview Terrace, across from The Meridian apartments, formerly known as Gateway, and just east of South Halls.

The complex of seven dorms for 775 undergraduates will replace the small, white, post-World War II vintage graduate student family homes.

Eastview Terrace, scheduled for completion in time for the Fall 2004 Semester, will be the first new undergraduate housing since the 1986 construction of Nittany Apartments.

Gordon Turow, director of campus planning and design for the Office of Physical Plant, briefed board members about the plans for Eastview Terrace as well as construction projects and land purchases at Commonwealth Campuses.

The dorms will provide an attractive "campus gateway," Turow said. The buildings bear an estimated price tag of $65 million, which will be paid through housing fees, not tuition. Since most existing dorms are already fully paid for, Turow said expansion is more affordable.

"At the beginning of the design process, we asked the design team to use West Halls as a model," he said.

The dorms will have a courtyard and terrace structure to accommodate the sloping land on which the buildings will rest. Like West Halls, the dorms will also have portal walkways through the buildings.

The two- to five-story dorms will be created in a "cluster" layout, with eight to 20 single rooms per cluster.

The plan has the single rooms slated for junior and senior students. During the summer, visitors attending conferences hosted at Penn State can use the rooms, Turow said.

Each room will have a private bathroom and the clusters will share common areas, laundry facilities and a kitchen area, Turow said.

"They are designed . . . so that it's pretty hard to sneak into a building and sneak out without some sort of social interaction," said Jonathan Teicher, Eastview Terrace project manager for Hayes Large, one of the architectural firms working on the development.

Geoff Grivner, student trustee, saw the presentation at Friday's board meeting.

"As you go along, people love the idea of having their own room . . . but there is still community," Grivner said of the new cluster plan.

Clusters are put together in I, L and T shapes joined by elevators and glass-enclosed stairwells.

Features of the new housing area include shingled gable roofs and brick veneer exteriors on buildings, and a main outdoor staircase modeled after the Spanish Steps in Rome.

A multipurpose room and Residence Life and housing staff offices, as well as the main commons desk for the dorms, will connect the first and seventh buildings in the complex.

Families living in the old structures at the Eastview site will move out by this summer, when demolition will begin. The families have the option of moving to the Graduate Circle apartments.

Designers expect students living in the new complex to eat in Redifer Dining Commons, which is slated for renovation and expansion to accommodate the Eastview Terrace residents.

There will be refinements made to the dorm design as the process continues, Teicher said.

"It's like watching a photograph when you start with a really rough image in the developing pan and then it gets sharper and sharper," he said.