PROVO, Utah — Construction on the new Joseph F. Smith Building at BYU is ahead of schedule and expected to be complete by August or September of this year.

Photo by Mark Philbrick

Construction on the Joseph F. Smith Building on the BYU campus is on track for completion later this year. It is designed to take advantage of natural light and will be functional as a multi-use facility. It will house two colleges.

After completion of the structure, the university will go to work furnishing the building. That effort is expected to last into Winter Semester 2005.

The Smith Family Living Center will be replaced by the five-level Joseph F. Smith Building. With a design that will allow natural light to enter most of the facility, the building will become a campus centerpiece and will accommodate the two largest colleges on campus.

The new building will house significant portions of the College of Humanities, including the Humanities Research Center, the Center for Language Studies and the university's language departments. Units from the College of Family, Home and Social Sciences will also be housed in the building, such as the School of Family Life, the Family Studies Center, Women's Research Center and child and family studies labs.

Paid for through private donations, the building will feature 27 classrooms, 401 faculty and administrative offices, a large auditorium, a theater and a three-level, 265-stall underground parking lot. The building contains more than double the square footage of the existing building on a smaller footprint.

Beyond these accommodations, the building will feature a landscaped courtyard and a gallery. Made entirely of glass walls, the two-story gallery will allow not only views of the plaza below but also of the Wasatch Mountains to the east.

The building's gallery, which is destined to become a natural gathering place and a showpiece of "education in Zion," will be a multimedia exhibit of the unique educational environment at BYU that promotes learning by study and also by faith, said C. Terry Warner, a professor of philosophy, who has been involved in the planning stages of the building.

Over time the gallery will highlight a variety of programs and disciplines across campus. For example, BYU's work with the family will be presented in the gallery.

"Going into this new building will allow us to house together scholars researching the family," said David B. Magleby, dean of the College of Family, Home and Social Sciences. "Another great advantage of having this new building in the center of campus is that it will be accessible to literally thousands of BYU undergraduates who are prospective parents. Here they will gain remarkable insights into the family as the world's basic unit of society."