The Student Union Memorial Center
The Student Union Memorial Center, located on the north side of the Mall east of Old Main, was completely reconstructed between 2000 and 2003, replacing a 270,000-square-foot (25,000 m2) structure originally opened in 1951 (with additions in the 1960s). The new $60 million student union has 405,000 square feet (37,600 m2) of space on four levels, including 14 restaurants (including a food court with such national chains as Burger King, Panda Express, Papa John's Pizza and Chick-fil-A), a new two-level bookstore (that includes a counter for Clinique merchandise as well as an office supplies section sponsored by Staples with many of the same Staples-branded items found in their regular stores), 23 meeting rooms, eight lounge areas (including one dedicated to the USS Arizona), a computer lab, a U.S. Post Office, a Pinkberry Frozen Yogurt, and a copy center named Fast Copy.
The building was designed to mirror the USS Arizona. A variety of sculptures pepper the premises, decorating the air with the chimes of dog tags or the colors of refracted light in honor of those who have served. A bell housed on the USS Arizona, one of the two bells rescued from the ship after the attack on Pearl Harbor, has a permanent home in the clock tower of the Student Union Memorial Center on campus. The bell first arrived on campus in July 1946. The bell is rung seven times on the third Wednesday of every month at 12:07 pm β symbolic of the battleship's sinking on December 7, 1941 β to honor individuals at the UA, as well as after home football games.
The UA BookStores flagship store is located at the heart of SUMC on the ground level adjacent to the Rotunda, a spiraling stairway reaching three stories upwards with four giant relief sculptures on the support columns, each honoring one of the branches of the military. Water trickles from a pool down two giant anchor chains to the lower level where plaques host the individual names of UA students and alumni lost in World War II or the Vietnam or Korean Wars. The Student Union Memorial Center is an architectural highlight on campus β not for itβs utility (housing not only the BookStores, but offices, eateries and meeting rooms), but for the metaphoric glimpse it provides into our past, remembering those Wildcats that we have lost in the line of duty.
Read more about this topic: Camp Wildcat, Campus
Famous quotes containing the words student, union, memorial and/or center:
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, of union with God, the principle of all perfection.”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have given themselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)