PVCC breaks ground on science building

Construction of a new science building at Piedmont Virginia Community College should begin in the next several weeks.
Ceremonially, however, the building began going up Wednesday as gold-plated shovels full of dirt were turned over as a toast to the project.

At a cost of $11.4 million, the building known as the Kluge-Moses Science Building is the first new building to break ground at PVCC since the V. Earl Dickinson Building for Humanities and Social Sciences began construction in 1996.
“We don’t do this very often,” PVCC President Frank Friedman told a crowd of roughly 200 who gathered in the grassy field across from the college’s Main Building.
Kluge-Moses is designed to be 34,000 square feet and will house the college’s science and health programs and labs. It is scheduled for completion by fall 2010.

“Now, that’s a very tight schedule and if we run into too many surprises, we probably won’t make that,” said Edward Watson, associate vice chancellor for facilities management with the Virginia Community College System. “We’ve not usually been this tight on schedule, but we’re tight already and we haven’t started.”
The building is named after local winery operators Patricia Kluge and her husband, William Moses, who donated $1.2 million to the project. The couple’s donation is the largest ever made to PVCC in its 36-year history.
The couple, who also helped establish viticulture and enology programs at PVCC, the first of their kind at a Virginia community college, owns Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard in Albemarle County.
Moses said on Tuesday that he and Kluge wanted to make the donation to PVCC, in part, because they see the college as an “under-recognized asset of the community.”

Moses equated the college to a story from his childhood when he was in the car with his parents, who were sitting up front.
“My mother said to my father, ‘You know, we never used to sit this far apart,’” Moses said. “And he turned to her and said, ‘Nobody moved the steering wheel.’ ... PVCC is going to be here for a very, very, long time, long after we’re gone, nobody is moving this steering wheel.”