PROVO — What was once a cubist skyline along 900 East will soon become a sleek new housing development.
BYU officials and architects shared floor and site plans Thursday evening with the next-door Wasatch neighborhood regarding four new, four-story residence halls to replace Deseret Towers.
The buildings, with their white stone bases, red walls, peaked roofs and a central green area, will house more than 730 students in two- and three-bedroom apartments, similar to Heritage Halls.
Each apartment will have a kitchen and living room/dining room, bathroom and an extra sink in the hallway. The three-bedroom apartments will have two bathrooms.
The basement will have a communal laundry area with extra storage space for students, said Timothy Thomas, principal with Architectural Nexus.
There will be a large activity room on the first floor, and the four buildings will surround a grassy common area outside.
"Our hope is to have permits this spring, late spring, and early summer go out and get these constructed," said Ray Bernier, director of planning at BYU.
The project, which doesn't yet have a name, should take 14 months to build and hopefully will be finished by fall 2011.
No rent price has been set.
The buildings, which meet or exceed all structural and seismic codes, are energy efficient, Thomas said. They'll also have elevators for ADA compliance.
Although they loved the look of the buildings, with their peaked roofs and big windows, the 15 or so neighborhood residents at Thursday's meeting were concerned with parking.
Bernier said officials haven't generated an exact count on parking stalls yet, but the goal is to have everyone who lives in the apartment buildings be able to park on campus.
"How are you going to handle visitor parking?" asked Dave Armand, Wasatch neighborhood co-chairman. "It's a question that I'm sure will come up at the planning commission (meeting). With parking for visitors, it usually isn't taken into consideration, and it leads to the biggest amount of complaints."
Neighbors were also sad to learn that 1430 North, the road that runs south of the Marriott Center and Monte L. Bean Museum and Morris Center, will dead-end as it approaches the former Deseret Towers area, rather than connect up to 900 East, thus allowing for safer pedestrian access through Heritage Halls and onto campus.
The site has been a grassy field for months, after BYU razed two of the halls in the fall of 2006 and the rest beginning in late 2007.
The dorm-style buildings, built in the 1960s and '70s, were incurring expensive maintenance and becoming a less-popular housing option.
The Morris Center, in the center of the towers, was left intact and is not part of the current project, Bernier said.
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