Five Years and Now a Building Worth Waiting For

The old building smelled like your grandma’s basement. That’s how George James, an engineering student, put it. Not unkindly, just honestly. Dark beige walls. Concrete. A “senior research” room that contained an old microwave, a coffee machine, and a desktop computer still running Windows XP. That was the Technology Building at Colorado State University Pueblo, before it wasn’t anymore.

Wednesday, university leaders, state officials, construction partners and students gathered inside the freshly renovated Technology, Education and Engineering Building, known now as the TEE Building, to cut a blue ribbon and finally close the book on a five-year project that cost nearly $32 million, and survived a pandemic.

The building now houses three programs that have long needed the kind of space that actually matches what they’re trying to do. The School of Engineering. The School of Education. And the Southern Colorado Institution for Transportation Technology, known as SCITT, which has ambitions that its director, Dr. MD Rashad Islam, will describe in terms that sound almost outlandish until you realize he might not be wrong.

Dr. MD Rashad Islam, director of the Southern Colorado Institution for Transportation Technology, addresses the crowd. Behind him, the word ENGINEERING is mounted in bold black lettering on the TEE Building’s signature crimson wall.  •  Photo: CSU Pueblo

“On my first day, I shared a vision that Pueblo will be the silicon valley of transportation,” Islam said during his remarks. “And we are very close to it.” The new building is central to that plan, a physical home for research he says will eventually draw national attention to a city that has historically had to fight to be taken seriously as an economic engine.

Whether or not Pueblo becomes anyone’s silicon valley, the building itself is a genuine achievement. And the story of how it got here is a little complicated.

The renovation was supposed to take two and a half years. It took five. That math tells you something about the last half decade in general, and about this project specifically.

Dr. Dave Lumpel, the dean of the College of Science and Mathematics, called it an “adventure,” though he said the word with the kind of emphasis that suggests adventure wasn’t quite the word that came to mind during all of it. Engineering programs were displaced into temporary spaces across campus. Then, about six months into that arrangement, a fire broke out in the General Classroom Building, where the department had been moved. Another relocation. Then the pandemic hit and stretched the timeline out further still.

What’s notable, though, is what happened during all that disruption. The engineering program didn’t shrink. It grew. A new School of Engineering was formally established. A Civil Engineering major was launched. Students kept showing up, kept completing degrees, kept going out into Southern Colorado to build things.

George James, the engineering student who spoke at the ceremony, framed it more plainly than most. He described the new building as “a monument to the perseverance of our engineers.” That sounds like something you’d say at a ceremony and maybe mean halfway. But watching him speak, standing in front of a building that is genuinely modern and genuinely equipped, it read as something closer to literal.

Engineering student George James addresses the audience. He described the old building’s “senior research” room as containing little more than an old microwave, a coffee machine and a computer running Windows XP.  •  Photo: CSU Pueblo

The new labs include a hydrology lab, an asphalt lab, and a second-floor curriculum resource center designed to serve future teachers who will go on to work in K-12 schools across Southern Colorado. That last one matters in a region where the teacher shortage is not abstract. CSU Pueblo sends a significant portion of its education graduates into local schools, which means the quality of that pipeline has direct consequences for communities across the region.

A robotic device on display in one of the TEE Building’s engineering labs. The new facility houses purpose-built research and lab spaces designed around hands-on, experiential learning. Additional equipment and instrumentation are still on order.  •  Photo: CSU Pueblo

Interim President Dr. Gail Mack, who spoke at the start of the ceremony, put the larger context plainly. “This building is an important milestone toward CSU Pueblo realizing its vision for our academic facilities,” she said. “We’re not just keeping pace. We’re creating spaces that match the quality of education our students deserve.”

After the formal ceremony, attendees filled the building’s open corridors to talk, tour the new spaces and mark the occasion.  •  Photo: CSU Pueblo

There’s a version of this story that’s just a facilities update. New labs, better lighting, modern infrastructure. That version is true, and for an institution that has often had to make do with spaces that weren’t quite right for the work, it matters more than it might sound.

Guests walk the newly finished corridors of the TEE Building after the ceremony. The renovation replaced decades-old infrastructure with purpose-designed lab and classroom space and modern research facilities.  •  Photo: CSU Pueblo

But there’s another version, too. One where a group of students and faculty spent five years scattered across a campus, teaching and learning in whatever rooms they could find, building a school and launching a new major with no fixed address, and then one Wednesday in early 2026 cut a blue ribbon in a building that finally looked like what they’d been doing all along.

“Let’s celebrate what we built together,” Dr. Mack said, near the end of her remarks, “and the generations of students who will benefit from it.”

Outside, Pueblo was Pueblo. Inside, for the first time in a long time, engineering at CSU Pueblo had a home.

University officials, state partners, construction team members and students mark the opening of the TEE Building. The $31.8 million renovation now houses the School of Engineering, the School of Education and the Southern Colorado Institution for Transportation Technology.  •  Photo: CSU Pueblo