The Glover Building on Colorado State University’s campus went offline Friday, Oct. 17. Starting this week, Glover will be decommissioned, with the plan to demolish the building beginning January 2026.
The Don and Susie Law Engineering Future Technologies building will be constructed in its place. This new building will serve as the hub for education and research in engineering, computer science and artificial intelligence.
“The key themes are around education and improving the education of our engineering students,” said Thomas Bradley, head of the department of systems engineering. “It’s about cross-disciplinary activities that we’re doing between engineering and computer science. It’s about breaking down boundaries between the different departments in the (Walter Scott, Jr.) College of Engineering so that students from all different parts of the College of Engineering can have exciting new experiences in future engineering technologies.”
The project was announced by CSU President Amy Parsons in October 2024. Over the past year, the College of Engineering has been gradually preparing for the building’s imminent demolition.
“We’ve been moving faculty and students and staff and laboratory equipment out of the old building,” Bradley said. “There’s a process that then is the decommissioning, where they disassemble and mitigate the old building. That starts in the spring semester.”
The project is expected to occupy a significant amount of space. The paths to Glover’s west and east ends will be occupied during the project. The extra space is taken this early as to not disrupt students’ movements in the area during the day.
“The fences will remain in place for the length of the project so that the campus community only needs to adjust once rather than several times as construction grows over the coming months,” said Tanner Brown, project manager. “The initial change will be inconvenient, but this plan was developed with campus safety as the highest priority.”
Along with space, the project is expected to be very distracting. The noise pollution from the Glover project, along with the noise coming from both the renovations of Allison Hall and the Clark Building, has raised concern from some students and instructors who will convene in the engineering and physics buildings for class.
“Most of the auditoriums are right next to it, so (the Law Building project) probably would be pretty annoying during classes,” said Augusto Jerez, CSU engineering exploratory studies student.
The Glover Building began construction in 1948 as a veterinary hospital but was eventually adapted to house engineering classrooms and labs. Since then, several more buildings have been built in its vicinity, and the building has become less effective in serving its purpose. Bradley said this inadequacy is one of the reasons for its replacement with the future Don and Susie Law building.
“The Glover Building is not really set up to enable these kinds of interactions and these kinds of opportunities for our students,” Bradley said. “It really has fallen out of use and fallen out of step with the time of what we need to have happen in the building. The new building is going to have a variety of things that are really going to accomplish this.”
The area is out of commission for now, but future students will have a new building to enjoy; the Don and Susie Law Engineering Future Technologies building will open in summer 2028.
“I’ve seen the (Glover) Building from the outside at least, and it looks kind of old,” Jerez said. “I’ve never been inside, so I’m not sure what it’s like. If it’s for a better and newer building, then I guess it would be all right.”
Reach Robert Sides at news@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
