A new academic building on campus, the Roux Center for the Environment, will begin construction in May 2017 and is scheduled to open in mid-to-late fall 2018. The center, funded with a $10 million gift from Barbara and David Roux, will provide classroom, laboratory and faculty office space.
The building will be located on the corner of Harpswell Road and College Street, across from the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center. The land used to hold the Kappa Alpha Sigma house, but the land has been unoccupied since the house was torn down in 2013.
Bowdoin’s environmental courses are currently dispersed around campus, primarily in Adams Hall and Druckenmiller Hall. The Roux Center for the Environment will “bring together faculty and students from across disciplines to encourage and facilitate creativity and collaboration about global problems of the environment,” wrote President Clayton Rose in a campus-wide email. The building will also “enhance our identity as a preeminent college in the study of the environment, and draw even more great students and scholars to Bowdoin.”
David Roux is one of only two members of the Board of Trustees who did not attend Bowdoin, though many of his relatives did, including his daughter Margot Roux '14. A graduate of Harvard College, David Roux is a cofounder, senior director and former CEO of Silver Lake Group. Barbara Roux is a graduate of University of Georgia and runs St. Bride’s Farm, an American show jumper breeding and training farm, in Upperville, Virginia.