ANN ARBOR—Interactive, inventive, immediate and global. These are the characteristics that students will experience in the new North Quad living/learning complex, whose schematic design was approved Friday by the University of Michigan Board of Regents.

Information, communication and media are major themes for the units that will occupy the academic tower, which will face Washington and State streets. Entities housed in the facility include the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, the Department of Communication Studies, the Language Resource Center and the Sweetland Writing Center, all components of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), and it will house the School of Information (SI), enabling SI to bring all its faculty together in the new building. The building will house three TV studios, a Media Gateway, a cyber cafe, media intensive classrooms and research areas, exhibit space, as well as faculty offices, academic administration space, and graduate student workspace.

The Media Gateway will be located in central areas of the lower two floors and will incorporate small team spaces, individual work stations and larger gathering spaces. Classrooms will do double duty as meeting rooms in the evenings when not in use for instruction.

As the University’s first new residence hall to be constructed in nearly 40 years, the living portions of the complex will offer housing not found in any other facility on campus, said E. Royster Harper, vice president of student affairs.

” The living spaces, like the whole of the project, were designed to facilitate student learning, and student social and programmatic needs,” Harper said. ” The housing space is designed to offer students the features they desire, while working toward the goal of enhancing the connection between living and learning, and ensuring that residence hall students have an excellent, well-equipped, secure environment for personal and intellectual growth.”

The residence hall will offer two configurations: suites containing two double rooms and a living room and bath, and arrangements of four single rooms sharing a bath. Each residence hall floor houses lounges and cozies. The building also will offer a community learning center with additional small group study areas. The residence design is informed by the work of the Residence Life Initiative, a presidential task force that defined a U-M community of the future that co-locates living space, classrooms and public gathering spaces across campus to create neighborhoods built on the premise that learning and discovery occur everywhere. The RLI envisions residential life that fully and imaginatively connects academic and residential life, encourages personal and intellectual development, and promotes engagement in the broader community.

A double-height dining hall, accommodating about 180, will be located in a low rise portion of the academic tower, with views to the outdoor space adjacent to Rackham Auditorium, the central plaza and Washington Street. An image cafe will offer coffee and snacks in an interactive media environment.

” Our design for North Quad reinforces the unique architectural and planning traditions of the Ann Arbor campus, with massing and forms based on the very special blend of Collegiate Gothic and the Arts & Crafts which uniquely identify the campus,” said Robert Stern, lead design architect for the project. ” Working in the first half of the twentieth century, architects Emil Lorch, Pond & Pond, and Albert Kahn designed such buildings as the Union, the League, and Lorch Hall, creating a rich tapestry of deep red brick, stone, and slate to shape arcades of flattened arches, grand engaged colonnades, and landmark towers. Just as we did in designing Weill Hall (2006), which now constitutes the southern gateway to the main campus, we looked to this tradition as we approached the design of the North Quad in order to shape a new university environment where living, learning, and academic support will coexist on a full-block anchoring the northwest corner of the main campus.”

Stern noted that welcoming plazas at the northwest and southeast corners of the block open up the quad to its surroundings while a caf