Students and faculty attended the Rackham open house to celebrate the $3.6 million renovations and the moving of the orthodontics and prosthetics program Tuesday afternoon.
Attendees gathered on the first floor for a free buffet and to explore the building.
History professor Russell Olwell said the renovations were beautiful.
“The renovation makes the building almost unrecognizable,” Olwell said. “There were parts of this building that people wouldn't want to go and see before and now they've turned it into really beautiful classroom space."
The classrooms that resulted from the renovation, which started in 2013 according to M-Live, are very specialized. The following programs and departments have classrooms and offices on the second floor: the physician’s assistant program, social work counseling, a new nursing and occupational therapy home health lab and the orthotics and prosthetics program.
“I think it's awesome,” biology freshman Josh Cornett said. “I've checked out a lot of labs. I plan on going on to medical school so this is very interesting to check out. I definitely want to look at prosthetics.”
The prosthetics program is housed, for the most part, in the basement. There is a clinical lab, a research library, R & D sewing room, plaster lab, machine shop and fabrication lab.
“All of the new facilities are beautiful," orthotics and prosthetics graduate student Dave Rice said. "It's quite an upgrade over what we had last year at Warner. We have lots of space [and] wonderful tools."
The first floor has a demonstration kitchen for the nutritional services program and room for the exercise science program. The white marble counter that dominates the room is state of the art, like the rest of the rooms. It has a slip resistant floor and three rows of seats with built in tables.
Nick Pomante, a graduate assistant in the dietetics and human nutrition program, said the tables would adjust to be used as a desk or a cutting board.
There is also a set of cameras so students can watch the teacher. The image can replay on one of the several large flat-screen monitors that are mounted like pictures around the room.
"I think it's great,” Pomante said. “I think that overall, it's really retro fitted. I like how they kept some of the old style. Yet it's a really modern building, so it has that historical feel to it. Each and every discipline here has state-of-the-art equipment. They didn't cut corners on any piece of it."
Sarai Troutman, a graduate speech and language pathology student, said the renovations do a great job of blending the new parts of the building with the old.
"It looks very natural to me and I really appreciate kind of the quirkiness of having the animals in the tile,” Troutman said. “I think that is really, really sweet. Just because in modern buildings, you don't often see that."
The animal tiles in the wall, kept from the building's previous life, are in the building for the same reason as the small built-in lockers in the main hallway. Up until recently, Rackham was a daycare center for the children of students and staff members. The service will still be offered at the Children's Institute, across Cornell Road from Cornell Courts.
"Aside from taking away my favorite classroom, they have transformed it into something really, really nice and special," ECA lecturer Valerie Canter said.
