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The new $35 million campus center at Lawrence University in Appleton will be named for former Lawrence president Richard Warch and his wife.

As part of the public launch of Lawrence’s $150 million capital campaign, William Hochkammer, co-chair of Lawrence’s “More Light” campaign, announced Friday that the 107,000-square-foot campus center currently under construction will be named the Richard and Margot Warch Campus Center.

The name honors Lawrence’s 14th president, who led the college from 1979 until his retirement in 2004, and his wife.

“The Richard and Margot Warch Campus Center will be a destination for the entire Lawrence community students, staff, faculty and alumni,” said Hochkammer, a 1966 Lawrence graduate and past president of the Board of Trustees. “It is fitting that the college’s principal meeting place be named in honor of the Warches. Rik was a strong advocate for the importance of personal interaction outside of the classroom to a liberal education. Rik and Margot personally contributed greatly, through their own interaction with students, staff, faculty and alumni, to strengthening the Lawrence community.”

Discussions of a new student center had been held since the mid-1980s. Construction of the Richard and Margot Warch Campus Center, slated for completion next summer, became a key part of Lawrence’s current capital campaign and was made possible by a $16 million gift from an anonymous donor in August 2006. Work on the center began in June 2007.

“The campus center project has been on Lawrence’s agenda for nearly 20 years, and I had the privilege of dealing with it for 15 of them,” said Warch. “There were many starts and stops along the way as we sought consensus on how to proceed. I commend President Beck and the Board of Trustees for figuring out how to proceed.”

The four-story building with views of the Fox River will include dining services and catering facilities, a convenience store and café, a cinema similar to commercial movie theaters, a logo merchandise store, the campus post office, meeting space for students and student groups, and venues for major campus events.

The campus center is being built to LEED Silver certification standards. It will include a vegetated roof system of soil and green plants to absorb rainfall and decrease storm water runoff, low-flow plumbing fixtures to reduce water consumption by more than 30 percent by standards mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems designed to be 21 percent more energy efficient than industry standards require.

Warch came to Lawrence in 1977 as the college’s vice president for academic affairs. He was named president in 1979. During his 25-year tenure, Warch oversaw the construction of six new campus buildings and the renovation of eight others. Lawrence’s endowment grew from $23.4 million at the start of his presidency to $182.2 million at the time of his retirement.

Margot Warch also spent a lengthy career in education, teaching for 27 years at Fox Valley Technical College. She retired in 2004 as the chair of the FVTCs Goal Oriented Adult Learning Reading Lab.

The Warches live in Ellison Bay.