CHOW! WINTER 2004
A
C Community
ulinary
LCC’s Center for Meeting and Learning really cooks.
■
Story By Lance Sparks ■ Photos By Todd Cooper
I
n 1995, the generous and visionary
voters of Lane County passed a
$42.8 million bond measure
designed
to
bring
Lane
Community College into the twenty-first
century. In the eight years since, the learn-
ing village that is LCC has raised many
fine new buildings — Welding
Technology, with state-of-the-art equip-
ment; greatly expanded Science Building,
with new labs and classrooms; the homey
and welcoming Child Care Village; the
elegant Students First (Building 1) hous-
ing Student Services; plus critically
important other additions and remodels of
existing buildings.
One of the most intriguing and promis-
ing of the new structures, and one of the
last completed, is Building 19, christened
the Center for Meeting and Learning,
intended to provide offices, classrooms,
kitchen facilities and meeting spaces for
LCC’s thriving Culinary Arts and
Hospitality programs. The new structure
sits near to and parallel with Students
First, on the west side of the campus, very
near the main entrance. In appearance, the
exterior is plain and unadorned, gray
cement with touches of warm brick and
Culinary Arts students
Joe Alves, Neal Stuck,
and Mike Levinson.
Building 19: Center for Meeting and Learning.
painted cedar siding on the facade, the
whole quite consistent with the rest of the
campus architecture, simple, clean, cost-
effective and functional. The nearby
grounds are still largely raw topsoil and a
few young trees; over the next few months
LCC’s talented gardeners will transform
www.eugeneweekly.com
the landscape with fresh plantings of flow-
ers and shrubs.
Inside the verdant beauty of the
grounds and the forested hills of the west
campus are clearly visible through the
huge glass windows that front the building
and illuminate the lobby and reception
area. Here, too, the space is functional,
clean and spare: good carpet in neutral col-
ors, cream paint on the walls, modernistic
but comfortable seats and benches. The
bare walls scream for art, but “I have a
plan for that,” says Peg Allison, chair of
the whole division and director of
Conference and Culinary Services. She is
energetic yet calm, articulate yet soft-spo-
ken, but boundlessly enthusiastic about the
potentials for her building, her programs,
students and staff and the activities they
will promote and serve.
In fact, Peg Allison and the College
have many plans for the Center, plus the
reasonable confidence that those plans can
be quickly realized, because the Center is
so well planned and equipped to meet the
College’s and the larger community’s
needs for a special space that can serve
many purposes: training and educating a
growing number of people who intend to
make professions in the fields of culinary
arts and hospitality; providing spaces,
large and small, where organizations can
meet and confer, or conduct workforce
training with access to the latest in com-
munication technology; offering business-
es and community groups food services
and support on a welcoming campus envi-
ronment that encourages a sense of part-
nership in our common goals of improving
the quality of life and work in all of Lane
County.
The real keys to the Center’s potentials
lie in its people — 70 to 75 trained stu-
dents in Culinary Arts, an equal number in
Hospitality programs, plus highly skilled
and experienced professionals who are the
teachers and trainers — and in the quality
of the tools the staff has been provided
through the generosity of many individu-
als and local businesses, “who raised over
$300,000 to finish the preparation
kitchen.” For example, Tom and Kathy
Wiper and Curtis Restaurant Supply con-
tributed hugely to create the Wiper
Culinary Arts Classrooms, a space where
teachers can lecture, step over to a demon-
stration area, show techniques to students,
then let the students move to six stations to
practice their lessons. Each station is
equipped with a top-of-the-line six-burner
Wolf range, covered by a gleaming stain-
less-steel hood, supplemented by stain-
less-steel tables, rolling racks, Hobart
CHOW! JANUARY 22, 2004 5