A football center, an art museum, a dormitory and a science center.
And another science center, another dormitory, a plaza and a school of nursing.
In the past ten years, Duke has added more than $375 million worth of structures to every part of the Gothic (and in some cases, not so Gothic) Wonderland as it worked to cement its top tier status.
“It’s busy,” Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said midway through the decade.
The largest, most expensive projects—intended to provide state of the art accommodations for Duke's scientists and engineers—were the Fitzpatrick Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences ($107 million) and the French Family Science Center ($115 million), completed in 2004 and 2006, respectively.
Just down Science Drive, Duke doubled the size of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy with the addition of Rubenstein Hall in 2005, and then got Colin Powell to speak at the building's dedication.
Duke also built new dormitories on East Campus and West, at a cost of $53 million, and the waning days of 2009 brought a proposal to build yet another residence hall on West. To give students a new place to hang out on campus, administrators constructed a $10 million, 40,000 square-foot plaza connecting the Bryan Center to the Flowers building and Main Quadrangle.
Other hot hang out spots added in the 00's include Von der Heyden Pavilion and the Link, both added as part of renovations to Perkins Library (though in different phases).
But those looking for a locale a bit more upscale than the plaza's Panda Express tend to frequent the Washington Duke Inn (a $25 million upgrade in 2005 added 100 rooms, a conference center and a ballroom) or the Nasher Museum of Art, which opened in 2005 after years of planning and $23 million in spending.
Athletics, too, reaped its share of the building bounty. The $23 million Yoh Football Center was completed in 2002 with an eye to drawing talented football recruits, while the Coach K Center for Academic Excellence was built, in part, to keep K at Duke.
In the coming decade, look for Duke to build on Central Campus and abroad—that is, if it can shake the financial crisis (but let's save that one for later).
The building boom at Duke was number 9 on our stories of the decade list. These are the issues and events that made headlines for weeks at a time over the last ten years, those that sparked the most debate on campus and beyond, and the ones that we believe will continue to shape our coverage in the years to come.
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