California State University, Monterey Bay, will break ground Thursday on the Alumni & Visitors Center, the young university's third new building.

The new center will be built at the corner of 3rd Street and 4th Avenue. Members of the Alumni Association, current students, faculty, administrators and staff are expected to attend the event, from 11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. The new center will serve as the gateway to the university for alumni and all guests.

The 12,500-square-foot building will be a central meeting point for alums and house alumni association offices.

CSUMB's University Advancement division, including fund-raising, publications and media, will have offices in the new building when it opens in January 2005.

The building will include meeting space and be staffed to provide information to all visitors to the campus.

There are 2,049 CSUMB alumni, and about 550 are active members of the CSU Monterey Bay Alumni Association, which meets monthly.

"For such a young university, we will be fortunate to have a place for our alumni to call home," said Stephanie Regevig, director, alumni relations.

"The Alumni & Visitors Center will be a place for alums to congregate for special events, committee and board meetings. They'll always have a home to visit for maintaining a bond to CSUMB."

Until early this month, two old military buildings were on the site of the future Alumni & Visitors Center.

Those two buildings were "deconstructed," meaning the building's boards were disassembled in the reverse order of construction. At a recovery facility on campus, the lead paint was removed from the recovered boards and the wood milled for reuse as lumber for new construction.

If the deconstruction process had not been used to remove the buildings, the lead-painted boards would have to go to a landfill, incurring high financial and environmental costs.

If this CSUMB pilot study proves economically feasible, the pioneering method can be used to remove old buildings on military bases across the United States.