UH razing Henke Hall to build new science facility

Construction crews began tearing down one of the oldest buildings on the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus Friday to make way for a new science building.

Henke Hall, which sat along East-West Road adjacent to Hamilton Library, at one time housed the School of Social Work. A new $50 million, 45,000-square-foot life sciences building will be built on the site and is scheduled to open in fall 2019.

The facility will include classrooms, teaching and research laboratories, and laboratory support and office spaces expected to be used by 1,000 students weekly.

Officials say the Life Sciences building will help foster interdisciplinary collaboration across ­science fields, providing new facilities for Manoa’s biology, microbiology and botany departments under the College of Natural Sciences, along with the Pacific Biosciences Research Center.

The building will be UH’s first design-build project, meaning a single contractor is handling both design and construction at a fixed, upfront cost, versus the design-bid-build method, by which planning and design are handled by one contractor and construction is handled by another in separate phases. UH awarded the design-build contract to Layton Construction Co. LLC.

After faculty and students relocate to the new facility, the next phase of the project will involve taking down the aging Snyder Hall, which houses the Microbiology Department. Demolishing Henke and Snyder is expected to eliminate $19 million worth of deferred maintenance from the university’s repair backlog.

Henke Hall was named for Louis Albert Henke, a UH professor of animal husbandry from 1916 to 1954.