By Nayab Malik
Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) may be able to move into its new building by next May or June, said Steven Franklin, Northwestern University in Qatar’s executive director for planning and construction, at a community meeting for students on Sunday.
NU-Q is currently situated on the third floor of the Carnegie Mellon building in Qatar.
The new building will have a state-of-the-art exhibition space, for a gallery and a museum. “It will be a museum of media communication, and will show the past, present and future of media,” said Everette E. Dennis, dean and CEO of NU-Q.
Speakers at this meeting emphasized how NU-Q’s new building will be much more interactive and will show technology related to the fields of media, communication and journalism.
“The forum area on the ground floor will be an open space. There will be a three-story high media screen with a grid of multiple news channels on display,” said Franklin. “The screen will be made up of 300 LED blocks hanging from the ceiling.”
Pamela Erskine-Loftus, director for the exhibition space, joined NU-Q 5 weeks ago to begin the planning and preparation stages for this space in the new building.
The gallery space will also include a circular display made up of dozens of interactive LED screens in order to allow people to feel like they are a part of this technological exhibit. “The screens are designed to interact with you. They will interact as you walk by them, and they will be responsive to touch,” said Franklin.
There will be four projectors that will create a 180-degree scene display in the gallery space. The amount of technology that will be used in this space is impressive, Franklin said.
We are working on the actual content of the screens in the gallery space– not just the hardware, but also more importantly the software, said Erskine-Loftus.
Students left the meeting excited about the future move from the Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar’s (CMU-Q) building to the new one.
“I’m excited about the new building and its facilities. I find it fascinating how there will be a lot of digital stuff,” said Jemina Legaspi, a communication freshman at NU-Q.
“Judging by the construction work so far, I think it’s going to take longer to open than May/June 2015. But I feel blessed that I’ll be able to use the facilities of a soon-to-be-best campus of media,” she added.
Amanda Melhem, a freshman at NU-Q, said she felt ecstatic after attending the meeting and was extremely impressed with everything that is being accomplished.
“I definitely don’t think the date is reliable but that’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just circumstances and things that might go wrong or be delayed,” she said.
“There are 10,000 stones on the building as of now, and each stone is cut differently. It might take longer to finish with the amount of detail that is going into the work. We really have no influence over these circumstances,” said Franklin.
