Twelve years after the opening of Taylor Place, the only residential hall at the Downtown Phoenix campus, a new multiuse dorm building will break ground March 2 and will bring hundreds of new dorm rooms to the campus.
The building, named the Downtown Phoenix Residence Hall and Entrepreneurship Center, is set to open in the Fall 2021. It will house students studying at the Downtown Phoenix campus as well as facilities for the Herberger Institute’s fashion and popular music programs and the Entrepreneurship and Innovation program.
The 16-floor building will contain over 75,000 square feet of space on the first three floors dedicated to rehearsal spaces, classrooms, practice rooms, a recording suite, illustration studios, printing and dying spaces, a fabrication studio and computer-controlled looms.
The first floor will also feature co-working and micro-retail spaces as well as an event venue.
From the fourth floor up, the building will house approximately 530 students from across the downtown Phoenix academic programs in apartment-style units, compared to Taylor Place's 1,284 students. The building will not have a dining hall but will have a cafe run by Aramark and marketed toward students.
The decision to move the fashion program and new popular music program from Tempe to the Downtown Phoenix campus was in response to a lack of funding for a space in Tempe and a desire to bring the two programs closer to the budding fashion and music industries in downtown Phoenix.
“Downtown Phoenix, particularly along Roosevelt Row and Grand Avenue, has become a hotspot for music performance and popular music venues,” said Jake Pinholster, associate dean for enterprise design and operations at Herberger.
The opportunity to bring in artists and musicians from the wider downtown community is something Pinholster said he is excited to see in action. He said the addition of the Herberger programs could bring a more artistic culture to the downtown campus.
Vincent Candido, a freshman studying social work, looks forward to the addition of Herberger majors to the Downtown Phoenix campus. He wants to see more artistically invested students come to the campus and create a greater sense of community.
The new dorm will house students from a mix of majors, including students from the Herberger Institute and the colleges already based on the Downtown Phoenix campus. Candido hopes this mixing will contribute to a more diverse campus culture.
“This might start to feel more like a campus and more like a little community, but right now being downtown feels like you're at an outpost for a bigger thing,” Candido said of a new dorm.
The opening of the new residence hall has the potential to relieve some of the stress Taylor Place has faced in recent years due to increased enrollment figures. At the beginning of the Fall 2019 semester, some students were placed in overflow housing at the Sheraton Grand Hotel until spaces opened up at Taylor Place, which was at capacity.
READ MORE: ASU University Housing moves Taylor Place residents off campus for the fall semester
“Taylor Place is nice, but it's pretty small,” Ashlyn Gygi, a freshman studying criminology and criminal justice, said. “I feel like this was overdue. There were a lot of people in hotels and not in the dorms.”
Pinholster looks forward to seeing how Herberger can grow and connect with the downtown Phoenix community and its artistic networks.
“We're really excited to see what the fusion of this downtown environment with brand new cutting edge facilities and these new creative industry majors can bring," Pinholster said.
Reach the reporter at gforslun@asu.edu and on Twitter @GretaForslund.
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