Kopp: New dorms

During his meeting with The Herald-Dispatch editorial board on Wednesday, the subject of the new dorms being built at Marshall came up, specifically the fact they are of wood frame construction.

Kopp said the new buildings exceed building code requirements, and they are built better than 95 percent of the buildings in Huntington. All residential areas will have sprinklers, and walls will be able to withstand one to two hours of fire, he said.
He also noted the buildings will have brick exteriors, not plastic.

“This is the way companies are building residence halls today,” Kopp said.
“If my children were young enough to go to college, those are the residence halls I would want them to live in.” he said.

The wood frames will allow flexibility for the buildings in the future, Kopp said. The Twin Towers were built in the 1960s or 1970s, and they have very little flexibility. They are showing their age, and students do not want to live in them because they do not fit the way students want to live nowadays, Kopp said.

Kopp then turned the question around. Should Huntington require all multi-tenant residential buildings to have sprinklers, he asked. The Emmons buildings were of concrete and steel construction, but they did not have sprinklers, he said.