Anyone driving past the intersection of Lane Avenue and Kenny Road recently has probably noticed the enormous pile of dirt located where several athletic fields used to be.
Next to that pile of dirt is a large hole, where over the course of the next two-plus years the first of what could eventually be dozens of new buildings on Ohio State University’s west campus will take shape.
Construction started on the five-story, 305,000-square-foot building in September, and is scheduled to continue until May of 2023. The new building, to be known as the Interdisciplinary Research Facility, will open sometime in the summer of 2023.
Renderings released by the university show a glass, brick and steel structure bordered by a tree-filled exterior plaza.
Also scheduled to open in the summer of 2023 is the Energy Advancement and Innovation Center, a project developed in conjunction with Ohio State Energy Partners, the private company that manages OSU’s energy infrastructure.
That building, which will feature a 24,000 square-foot solar array, will be located next door to Interdisciplinary Research Facility. Although final renderings of the building have yet to be released by OSU, construction work is scheduled to start next June.
Several other buildings are planned immediately to the north and south of those two buildings – an office building, which would sit just south of Lane Avenue and west of Kenny Road, and two more buildings to the south that are considered the second and third phases the Interdisciplinary Research Facility.
Spokesperson Dan Hedman, of OSU’s Office of Administration and Planning, said that those future phases “would require additional approvals and no timeline is yet known.”
A timeline has been set for the new Wexner Medical Center building currently under construction nearby, at the southwest corner of Kenny and Carmack roads. Work on the new West Campus Ambulatory Center Facility started last summer and is scheduled to wrap up in 2023, with a phased opening planned for the spring and summer of that year.
The three buildings – the Interdisciplinary Research Facility, the Energy Advancement and Innovation Center, and the Ambulatory Center Facility – are being touted as the first three major pieces in what OSU is calling its West Campus Innovation District, a large mixed-use district that could eventually stretch as far west as North Star Road and as far south as Kinnear Road.