Though planned renovations to parts of Dennison Hall have been severely delayed, University Provost Phil Hanlon confirmed yesterday that the project would move forward in the near future, hinting that it may be of a larger scope than previously reported.

In an interview yesterday, Hanlon suggested a renovation to one floor of Dennison Hall, which would convert classrooms into offices, could move forward as soon as this summer.

“The work will be going on with Dennison,” Hanlon confirmed, not giving a specific timeline.

The fourth floor of the building — described by former University Provost Teresa Sullivan last year as having “terrible classrooms” — was set to be renovated over the summer in 2009 to house offices of several environmental and sustainability units on campus.

However, the project was delayed. Now, one and a half years later, officials are drafting plans to complete renovations of the building’s sixth floor instead.

“It was delayed because the original design didn’t actually fit quite with the programs that were going to be put in there so we had to put that off,” Hanlon explained. “And once you put that off, you have to wait an entire year because we couldn’t do construction when there are classes going on in the building.”

Two programs are slated to move into the sixth floor of Dennison after it’s renovated — the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute and the Barger Leadership Institute.

The Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute currently occupies a leased space at 625 East Liberty St. in a suite above Starbucks. The Barger Leadership Institute is already housed on the seventh floor of Dennison Hall.

During the interview, Hanlon also hinted that more of the building may be renovated in the near future.

“Stay tuned on this,” Hanlon said after being asked about converting classrooms in Dennison Hall. “I think you’re going to hear something fairly major pretty soon.”

Hanlon didn’t specify what the “fairly major” announcement would be. However, it’s unlikely that the renovation of only the sixth floor would constitute a "fairly major" announcement, since Sullivan already announced plans to renovate a floor of the building in an interview with The Michigan Daily in 2009.

“It won’t hurt the educational program. In fact, it will make it better because nobody’s going to have to teach or learn on the fourth floor of Dennison anymore,” Sullivan said at the time. “We can replace these crummy classrooms with better classrooms.”

The renovation and relocation of the programs is part of an initiative to better utilize existing facilities owned by the University, Hanlon said.

“We remain very committed to making better use of our classroom facilities,” he said. “We want to use our University space as efficiently, as effectively as possible.”

Ultimately, Hanlon said, that means converting outdated classrooms to better meet the needs of the University, which could reduce the amount of space the University leases.

“In instances where we built these sort of banked classrooms with horseshoe shaped tables and lots of technology, we of course don’t want to look at (converting) those,” Hanlon said. “We want to look at the (classrooms) that are of lower quality, more traditional flat-floored, poor acoustics, and so on.”

In addition, Hanlon said it’s better to look for large blocks of outdated classrooms to convert into offices because it means there will be more options for designing the space.

“That gives us the most flexibility because if you take a set of classrooms and convert them to some other use, if they’re all together then we can take out walls and build other kinds of spaces,” he said.

These factors arguably make Dennison the perfect target for renovation and repurposing on campus.

“A lot of these things drive you back to Dennison because Dennison has a large collection of classrooms,” Hanlon said.