After 50 years of serving the ISU community, the often unnoticed Fisher-Nickell Hall will soon be demolished to make way for new sidewalks and landscaping.

Fisher-Nickell is now serving as a temporary home for the ISU Alumni Association until the completion of a new building on Beach Avenue next to the Iowa State Center. Completion of the Alumni Center is scheduled for spring or summer of 2008 and Fisher-Nickell is scheduled to be torn down shortly after the move is complete.

“The [Fisher-Nickell] building has reached the end of its useful life,” said Warren Madden, vice president for business and finance.

Madden said the building would require extensive renovations in heating, ventilation, air conditioning and communication services and the needed renovations would not be as economical as the construction of the new Alumni Center.

Fisher-Nickell, originally a residence hall, opened for the College of Home Economics in the heart of the Richardson Court Association and housed only women at the time of its construction in the late 1950s, said Charles Frederiksen, retired director of the Department of Residence.

The building was one in a series of four buildings for students taking classes in home management, a program devoted to giving women experience in management principles. At the time, most students in the College of Home Economics were women studying to be teachers or learning how to manage a family and household, Madden said. Many students in the home economics college were required to take classes in home management.

Roughly 12 women lived in the house at a time, under the supervision of a faculty member comparable to a house mother in the current Greek Community, and each quarter a new group of students moved into the house – at the time, Iowa State used a quarter-based schedule rather than a semester-based schedule.

“Every six weeks, we would have a new group of women rotate in,” said Madden, who lived in one of the home management residence halls with his wife. She was serving as a supervisor while attending graduate school.

The women were expected to maintain the home on a rotating schedule to gain experience in planning and preparing meals, cleaning and childcare.

“They were bringing babies in,” Frederiksen said. “It was an experience type of program.”

Children living in adoption agencies were brought into the home to give the women experience in caring for infants, Madden said, although Iowa’s adoption laws have changed since then.

As the home management program branched into an institution management program and later became hotel, restaurant and institution management, the Department of Residence passed Fisher-Nickell to the College of Education while Lagomarcino Hall was converted from an agriculture building to serve the college. Fisher-Nickell later served as a child development program building, Frederiksen said.

“I expect demolition of Fisher-Nickell to [take place] the summer of 2008,” Madden said.