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Kirby-Smith Hall is scheduled to reopen as a dormitory Aug. 1, 2011, after a year of renovations.
Steve Waller, director of Residential Life, said this will help alleviate next year’s standby list of students waiting for housing. As of Monday, 391 students were on the standby list for this year.
The first through seventh floors of Kirby-Smith will be renovated and refurbished, providing 360 beds for incoming students for the 2011-12 school year.
Instead of the usual five-year process to renovate or construct buildings, ResLife requested an Act 959, which will reduce the process to a year. The Act 959 was approved on Tuesday.
The estimated total project cost is $1.7 million, according to Act 959 Construction Project for Renovations to Kirby-Smith Hall for the LSU Department of Residential Life.
“The Act 959 allows urgency for space to bypass the five-year cycle with funds that we have already,” Waller said.
Because the project is only planned to use the $1.7 million ResLife already has, the process was shortened to roughly one year. The Act 959 allows projects to be reduced in time if they are using less than $5 million without loans.
Renovation costs include $400,000 for furniture and $900,000 to $1 million for maintenance. Kirby-Smith is also going to change to co-ed instead of all male to accommodate for the females who need housing as well.
Waller said Kirby-Smith will only stay open until the construction on East Laville Hall and the new Residential College North are finished and renovations on Acadian Hall are done. These projects are all scheduled to finish by 2015, meaning  Kirby-Smith will close again as a dorm after five years.
Waller said Kirby-Smith suffers from the “sardine mentality” of architects who designed buildings in the 1960s.
“They built it so they could cram in as many people as they could to account for the rise in the number of students because of the baby boom,” Waller said. “We’d never build something like that today.”
Since floors one through seven are going to reopen, only half of the building will be available to students. The rest of the floors will be office space, Waller said.
“It will be a quality facility,” Waller said. “We can make it work.”
Kirby-Smith originally closed in 2006 because the previous administration did not support students living there, and a $24.6 million project on the building was canceled at that time, according to Waller.
Kirby-Smith Hall was built in 1967 at a cost of $3.5 million, according to Barry Cowan, assistant archivist at the University Archives. It was named for Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, and at 154 feet tall, consists of 13 stories with possible space for 734 students.
Kirby-Smith has not been completely out of commission from 2006 to 2010.
Waller said conference groups, youth groups and visiting faculty sometimes stay in rooms there. From fall 2008 to spring 2009, interns and medical students stayed in Kirby-Smith while working at Earl K. Long Medical Center.
The hall also provided housing for those affected by Hurricane Gustav in 2008.
The Department of Health and Human Services also has offices on the upper floors of Kirby-Smith, Waller said. The department’s lease is scheduled to expire in a couple of years.
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Contact Meredith Will at [email protected]