Student Center

Exterior view of Student Center

CLOSED UNTIL LATE 2022 FOR RENOVATIONS

The Student Center has closed for two years while the building is heavily renovated as part of the Campus Center Project. Most of our critical services have moved to the Exhibition Hall, located at 460 Fourth Street NW, directly south of the ISYE building.

Reservations for 2022 Open in Spring

As the Campus Center Project nears completion, our team looks forward to serving your campus event needs in our expanded portfolio of new spaces. The completed Student Center will include 8 new meeting rooms, as well as a 165-seat theater with retractable theater seating and 297-seat theater. All rooms were named for Atlanta Streets through student voting.

Reservations for all spaces within the Student Center will be open to the campus community in the spring 2022 semester. When reservations open, the community can request most spaces though GT Events. Until then, we encourage you to explore these future spaces. Each space has a page that includes renderings of the room, capacities by available setups and comparisons to rooms with which the community is already familiar. For example, the Castleberry meeting room in the Student Center is approximately the size of the Inman Park room in the Exhibition Hall.

Interactive Map Temporary Locations for Our Services Campus Center Project

Student Center Rooms

Our Origins - The Fred B. Wenn Building

The Georgia Tech Student Center opened its doors in early 1970 as the realization of a dream and much effort on the part of Omicron Delta Kappa, a student honor society. The state‐of‐the-art building, just under 100,000 square feet in size met the needs of the nearly 7,000 students enrolled at that time. Building services included a cafeteria, a music browsing room, Craft Center, ballroom, movie theater, meeting rooms, full‐service Post Office, an art gallery, chapel, table service dining area, and several lounges. Additionally, the original building housed a recreation area with twelve bowling lanes, a billiards room, table games, playing cards, and a video arcade.

The Olympic Period

The 1996 Centennial Summer Olympic Games brought a world of attention and media coverage to campus, and the Student Center served as the center of athlete services during the games. Several areas in the building were modified to meet the needs of the 15,000 athletes and the Atlanta Committees for the Olympic Games.

Notable Facility Changes

To meet the overwhelming demand for lunch in the Food Court, an outdoor patio was enclosed in 1986 to create a 4,000 square foot, 350 seat Greenhouse dining room. In 1987, the Post Office was expanded with a 6,000 square foot addition to accommodate 15,020 mailboxes, nearly doubling the number of boxes previously available. In 1997, the Ballroom was expanded into 1,500 square feet of adjacent storage and patio space and was fully renovated to accommodate larger campus events. The Stamps Student Center Commons was completed in March of 2004 and was fully occupied and dedicated in August. Services included 4 dining concepts, SGA and Student Involvement Offices, 6 meeting spaces, numerous lounges, a central performance stage, and retail services. In the Fall of 2010, a new “fast‐food” Food Court in the Commons was built. The new line‐up offers a full‐service Chick‐fil‐A (relocated from the 2nd floor Food Court), Subway, and Panda Express.

CAMPUS LIFE ORIGINS

Many of Georgia Tech’s most beloved programs and traditions began in the Student Center. Staring with the building's opening in 1970 and continuing today, many treasured programs, such as Community Service Programs, FASET (Familiarization and Adaptation to the Surroundings and Environs of Tech), ORGT (Outdoor Recreation Georgia Tech), OPTIONS (student run non-credit courses), GT Edge (peer mentoring program designed to support incoming students), and more were created by Georgia Tech students. As the Student Center grows, its student-led origins will drive its future.

Campus Center Project

Visioning Process

In the last visioning exercises, members of the campus community were invited to consider how different building profiles might fit within the larger campus landscape appropriately. They were then asked to define what the spatial relationships should be between various offices, services, and activities should be in the future buildings using a 3-D puzzle.

Referendum Voting

Total Voter Participation | 5,025 students
Undergraduate Votes | 4,081 students (2,980 in favor, 1,101 opposed)
Graduate Votes | 944 students (350 in favor, 594 opposed)

Ideas Competition

Due to the nature of the ideas competition, the Georgia Tech community was able to review the ideas from three teams and select aspects from any proposal to include in the winning team’s final design. Hundreds of students, staff and faculty responded to the survey about each proposal.

Phase 1

Completion of Phase I, which includes includes the Pavilions and Exhibition Hall

Phase 2

Construction on Phase II begins, which includes the renovation of the Student Center and reconfiguration of the Campanile plaza.

Completion of Campus Center

Student Center Directors

Tim Mitchell from 1970 – 1973

Roger Wehrle from 1974 – 1992

Rich Steele from 1992 – 2010

Dr. Kim D. Harrington from August 2010 – 2015

Dr. Lindsay Bryant from 2016 – present

Staff longevity has been a hallmark of the Student Center with numerous staff ending their careers upon retirement from Georgia Tech. This trend continues as several current staff members have 20+ years of service.