Whitworth College plans to start work this month on a new visual-arts building it will erect at a total cost of $7.1 million.


The 19,400-square-foot building, to be built on the north side of Whitworths campus, is to include an 1,100-square-foot gallery, faculty offices, studios, a computer graphics laboratory, and an atrium, says spokesman Greg Orwig. Construction is expected to wrap up in in time for the start of the 2008-2009 school year, Orwig says.


Spokane-based T.W. Clark Construction LLC is the contractor on the project, and Madsen Mitchell Evenson & Conrad PLLC, of Spokane, designed it, he says.


Currently, the school houses its art department in a two-story, 17,000-square-foot building on the site where the new two-story structure will be built. The older facility, which was built in 1966 and remodeled in 1988, is outdated and wasnt designed to accommodate visual-arts classes originally, Orwig says.


Whitworth is developing a partnership with the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, of Spokane, in which it would display pieces of art in the new facility that would be part of traveling exhibits featured at the downtown museum, he says. Whitworth students also would work with the museum on a variety of projects, he says.


The school has received sufficient gifts and pledges to cover the cost of the new building, which is to be named after Ernst F. Lied in honor of a large gift given by the Lied Foundation Trust toward the project, Orwig says. That trust has donated money toward other projects at Whitworth. Other major donors for the new visual-arts building include Walter and Shirley Oliver, Charles and Karlyn Boppell, the Harriet Cheney Cowles Foundation, and LeRoy Nosbaum, chairman and CEO of Spokane-based Itron Inc.