Because the building is going to have so many different users — including faculty, staff, alumni, visitors, students and collaborators — facility space plan coordinator Kent Jones said that he and his team tried to create areas more conducive to collaboration. Special attention was given to ensure there was more natural light in public areas and there were informal places where people could meet and strike up a conversation.

“Part of the idea behind the design of the space was to get people out of their office,” he said. “We’re hoping there will be some creative collisions.”

Aesthetically the building is stunning. Floor-to-ceiling windows drench the first floor in natural light, and exposed ductwork gives the space a modern, industrial feel. Unexpected angles, rounded corners and high, arched ceilings keep things interesting. A peculiar stairway, original to the building, juts out into nothingness at one end, overlooking the first floor. Jones and his team call it the Titanic staircase because it comes to a point at the overhanging portion, not unlike the bow of the boat where Jack and Rose shared that memorable cinematic moment.

There’s also a large conference room with an 80-inch TV screen; a windowless seminar room perfect for movie screenings; a computer lab; a reading room; gender-neutral bathrooms; and Canon print stations at each elevator bank.

Faculty and staff had been preparing for the move months in advance, clearing out decades-worth of artifacts from their offices in the Language and Literature building. Among the boxes piled in Professor Jim Blasingame’s office was an old leather wingback chair filled with “peanut crumbles.”

“It belonged to two professors before me, and one of them ate peanuts in it,” he said with a grin. Blasingame found bits of the snack food in cracks and crevices of the chair for years.

Karla Elling, former Creative Writing Program manager and an English alum herself, may have been there when those peanut crumbles first found their way into the chair. She came to ASU as a freshman in 1961, when the English Department was still located in the University Club.

“The first poetry reading I heard at ASU was in 1961 — Robert Frost,” Elling said.

Later, as part of her position as program manager, she would welcome writers including Robert Bly, John Updike and Ken Kesey to speak at department events. She watched as “every day new ideas and possibilities popped up … with the brilliant graduate students and stellar faculty — Alberto Ríos, Norman Dubie, Rita Dove, Peggy Shumaker, T.M. McNally, Ron Carlson, Jay Boyer, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Jeannine Savard, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Melissa Pritchard, Cynthia Hogue, Sally Ball, Pete Turchi.”

Then, in 1964, “The English Department spread out from the old red brick building to the six-story Language and Literature building, the Piper Center and into collaborations with other wildly disparate areas,” Elling said, “various art disciplines at Herberger, palliative care at Mayo Clinic … Alzheimer’s units in the Valley, Arizona high schools and grade schools. If we could dream it, we could do it. The English Department, wherever housed, is a whole life, a window to the world.”