GMU Student Union Building I

Here follows an excerpt from the George Mason University library website:

George Mason University: A History
Mason's First Building Boom:
Filling out the First Forty Acres during the 1970s

In late 1970 the 568-acre Fairfax Campus of George Mason College comprised six buildings and a parking lot. The tiny North, South, East, and West Buildings opened in September 1964 and hosted classrooms, labs, administrative and faculty offices, and the dining hall. Fenwick Library and the Lecture Hall were completed in the fall of 1967. A seventh building, the Arts and Sciences Building, which was later named Thompson Hall, was still under construction and would not open until September 1971. The steady increase in enrollment, coupled with Mason’s ambitious expansion program, necessitated additional buildings.

In 1970, a new wave of building began at Mason. Key buildings would begin to fill the first forty cleared acres of the original 147 given by the Town of Fairfax in 1959. Aerial photography of the campus from that era showed some kind of construction, no matter what year the photo was taken. At one point in 1974, three major construction projects within yards of each other (the Fenwick Library Tower, Robinson A, and the Student Union) were in progress simultaneously. Construction trailers and vehicles, steel framing, and large piles of dirt were an everyday part of the campus landscape for much of the 1970s.

Student Union Building I, still one of the most visible structures on campus today, was in the planning stages in the early 1970s before groundbreaking occurred on February 29, 1972. [5] The building cost almost $1.4 million to construct and was scheduled to open in two phases. The first phase of the building, which included a lounge on the main floor and dining facilities on the lower level, was scheduled to be completed in 1973. The second phase, which added additional office space to the Student Union, would be finished in 1975. The Student Union Building was beleaguered by several small construction delays, and the first phase of the structure did not open until February 1974. Mason’s dining hall, known as the Ordinary, and the university bookstore, both of which had previously been housed in the East Building, found their new home on the lower level of the brand new Student Union.