Building for the Future

by Richard Hull

The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 20, Number 2.

Thanks to a substantial gift by Col. Jess, the Center for Inquiry is moving ahead with a planned 12,000-square-foot, $2.5 million expansion of its Amherst facility. Founder and Chairman Paul Kurtz said, “The need for additional space is indeed pressing. Staff now exceeds available office space, and we anticipate still more space needs as our visiting scholars program gets underway, the new Master’s in Science and the Public at the State University of New York at Buffalo is launched, and the library collection continues to grow beyond its present size of sixty thousand items.”

The architectural firm of Hamilton Houston Lownie Architects has provided the initial design that will shortly be put out for bids. Schematics of the proposed addition appear below. The new building will feature ten offices plus work space, three seminar rooms (each seating up to seventy-five people that can be thrown open to a single room seating over two hundred), a café and lounge, a covered courtyard for receptions during the warmer months, and space in the basement to permit expansion of the library, including fireproof and climate-controlled rooms for rare documents and archival materials.

Numerous naming opportunities for the new building are indicated to the right. For further inquiries, contact Richard Hull or Sherry Rook in our Development Office: rhull@centerforinquiry.net; srook@centerforinquiry.net, or (716)636-4869, ext. 311 (Richard) or 224 (Sherry). 

Richard Hull is development officer for The Center for Inquiry–International.

Richard Hull is development officer for CFI–International.