New East, home of the Department of City and Regional Planning, is located at 205 East
Cameron Avenue in the historic core of the Carolina Campus.  The Italianate building was
designed by William Percival and completed in 1861.  The new addition contained a men’s
dormitory plus a debating hall and library for the Philanthropic Society.  New East, along
with its counterpart New West, is a unique building to the Carolina Campus.  Their distinctive
architectural styles are a departure from their counterparts in the historic core on Campus.
Furthermore, the buildings placement in the Campus plan reinforced a new axis, which
was introduced by A.J. Davis with the placement of Smith Hall-Playmakers.

New East is a four-story building; it has a tripartite massing composed of a center bay
with two flanking wings.  The center mass is approximately a half story taller and has a
painted terne metal hipped roof which is capped off by a ventilator/cupola with windows
used as a clearstory in the attic.  The flanking wings have parapets and low-sloped metal
hip roofs.  The entire exterior is brick with a stucco finish and is painted a salmon color.
Six stylized Doric pilasters that support an abstracted entablature also accentuate the
center block.  A cornice with deep eaves and scrolled brackets defines the roof.  A dado
base line molding visually supports the pilasters and defines the piano nobile, which in
this building is second floor.  Framed square moldings constructed out of brick and
covered with a stucco finish define the windows on the north and south elevations of
the building.  The main entry of the building has a stone Doric order entry with a pediment.

Throughout its history, New East was at various times home to a student hospital, the
Medical School, and the departments of Biology, Geology and Geography.  In 1964, the
Department of City and Regional Planning took up residence at New East and has remained
until the present except for brief relocations due to renovations.

---

Hue Goes There?
Carolina peels back layers of paint in search
of its true colors
Carolina Alumni Review
David E. Brown ‘75

One day not long ago, Paul Kapp was called out
of a meeting.  Associate Vice Chancellor Bruce
Runberg was standing in the hall holding a cell phone.
The chancellor was on the other end of it.  New West
is wrong, James Moeser said.  Kapp is the campus
historic preservation architect, and the previous day
had been maybe his worst one in Chapel Hill, so he
was talking straight when he told Moeser, “I’m on it.”  


He’d gone to bed knowing that New West and New East, the Italianate twins built at the dawn of the
Civil War to flank Old West and Old East, were different colors.  The contractor had messed up and
missed the real color by a couple of tones.  And, after many decades of flirting with every cute blob
on the painter’s palette, Carolina apparently is done messing up colors.

…Now a historically correct rainbow is emerging, and it’s not guesswork based on faded black-and-
whites from the early years of photography.  An architectural conservator using a micro-scalpel and
a stereo microscope has analyzed the buildings down to their bones, producing coat-over-coat histories
that look like a scoop of that vanilla-chocolate-strawberry ice cream with three more colors thrown in.
Colors are revealed along with history… (read more)