Renovation of CIU dining hall completed over summer break

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Contractors completed renovations on the 17,000-square foot dining hall and kitchen at Columbia International University during the school’s three-month summer break.

The dining hall and kitchen on the second floor of the Rossi Building have been serving staff, faculty and students since 1975.

“It was quite an effort. It was an old building with a lot of unforeseen conditions,” said Ted Talmage, principal and owner of Talmage Architects.

Talmage Architects designed the dining and kitchen space. Mashburn Construction and Hallmark Dining assisted with the project, according to a news release. Hallmark Dining is the student dining services operation at CIU.

With three months during the CIU summer break to complete the work, Talmage said the team had the drawings and permitting done before the spring semester ended.

“We had to jump on it,” Talmage said. “It was a matter of staying daily involved in the project just because things came up because of the existing building and the nature of things hidden as we were doing demolition.”

The renovations included demolition of the original space to create an open floor plan with separate serving stations, increased seating and a state-of-the-art commercial kitchen. Individual dining and meeting rooms were added. A canopy and cafe-style seating were added to the front of the existing building.

Because the original building was built in 1975, crews had make several upgrades to bring it up to current building codes. They also discovered some existing structural elements that didn’t appear on the 1975 drawings of the building when they were installing the kitchen space, so Talmage brought in a structural engineer several times to review the conditions and suggest workarounds.

Talmage described the new design as “sophisticated, classy and refined.”

CIU CFO Rob Hartman credited Talmage with finishing the project on time.

“The short timeline of our project was considered by some to be impossible, but Ted responded by dancing back and forth between his office and the project scores of times in order to keep us on track,” Hartman said.