Winchester, Va. — Shenandoah University students and staff, as well as members of the university’s board of trustees and elected officials, gathered on campus Friday to watch as the historic Hazel-Pruitt Armory building — home of SU’s Hub for Innovators, Veterans and Entrepreneurs (HIVE) — was officially unveiled and reopened.
Built in 1940, the building originally served as a training ground for the National Guard from World War 2 until the early 1990s.
“We are so excited to bring this building online,” said SU Provost Karen Abraham. “… It’s already had a transformative effect on the campus, and we look forward to it having an even more transformative impact on our students, our faculty and also our community.”
Abraham explained that the building, which is named for two donors whose gifts made the project possible, has deep historical significance in Winchester as it was once home to the only National Guard unit on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. The National Guard gifted the armory to SU a couple of decades ago, but it took a while for the school to decide how to honor that legacy while also looking toward the future.
And thus, the HIVE was born.
Inside the complex, you’ll find a new headquarters for SU’s Center for Immersive Learning (SCIL), where students create immersive virtual reality experiences to enhance learning, training, and more. Around the corner, there’s a space for eSports management students, who are delving into an ever-growing and constantly buzzing industry. Most of the resources in the repurposed Armory building are centered on technology fields ranging from cybersecurity to augmented and virtual reality to data analytics and artificial intelligence.
The building will also foster outreach to veterans and military-associated families through the Student Veterans Center. The Center for Entrepreneurship, which Abraham said is still “in its infancy,” will eventually provide support for people who want to launch small businesses.
“I think it really gives us an opportunity to really engage with our community, and in a way that we’ve never done before,” Abraham said.
For the students studying the technology that is front and center at the HIVE, having a home base to develop their projects is exciting.
“We’ve kind of been living in the walls of the health and life science building, which was a very nice open space, but it was an unfinished basement, and there were some problems,” said SU senior Tyler Dosset. “… So having our own space has been really cool to finally get what we need, and kind of have our own space to really work with and be a little more visible to campus, because a lot of people didn’t know that we even existed for a long time.”
Dosset said he believes the HIVE will be a crucial part of the university going forward, and that “I only see this place growing, changing as the years go on.”
The architect for the project is ESa, based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the general contractor is Virginia-based Howard Shockey & Sons, Inc.
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Source: See the original story by Molly Williams/Winchester Star. Photo by Jeff Taylor/Winchester Star.