Last evening faculty and students gathered in Flora Rose House to celebrate the newest addition to the West Campus housing system. The Flora Rose House is the fifth and final house in West Campus and West Campus Housing initiative.

Despite its completion last year, the Rose House will now be officially entered into the West Campus House System. The West Campus Housing Initiative was finished under budget and two years ahead of schedule.

As Sinead Lykins ’12 was about to start her Spring Break, she was unpleasantly surprised when maintenance personnel arrived at her Lyon Hall dorm room, intent on removing the two interior doors in her three-room suite.

As part of an effort to bring certain West Campus dorms into compliance with fire code changes, Cornell Housing scheduled interior doors to be removed from several West Campus dorm rooms on the afternoon of March 13.

Seven years and $225 million after construction began, every brick of the West Campus Housing Initiative is in its place. One of the final steps took place on Friday with the announcement that the last house — formally House 5 — will be named in honor of Flora Rose, a nutrition professor and founder of the College of Human Ecology.

In a ceremony on Friday, Edna Dugan, assistant vice president for student and academic affairs and a Becker House fellow, announced the decision to name the house after Rose.

“We have investigated many, many deceased faculty’s biographies,” Dugan stated in a press release. “So it is so fitting that House Five should become Flora Rose House ... to recognize her legendary status in Cornell history.”

Consider this: the Class of 2008 will be the last Cornell class with any memories of West Campus before the West Campus House System opened its first house, Alice Cook House, in August 2004. Since then the House System has tripled with Carl Becker House opening in 2005 and Hans Bethe House opening this fall. Next August, house four, William Keeton House, will open. When as yet unnamed house five join this lineup in a few years, 1,800 Cornell sophomores, juniors and seniors will live, eat, work, debate, reflect, recreate, and relax in the West Campus House System together with five House Professor-Deans, five assistant deans, 29 graduate resident fellows, 15 student assistants and 150 House Fellows — Cornell faculty and senior administrators who venture down the hill to participate in various House activities.

If like many not-so-early-birds you’ve been snoozing through that 8:40 class, you probably should have dropped your class. Or lived on West Campus.

“It’s like a second alarm,” said Rachel Holloway ’10. “The construction starts at 8 a.m. every morning which is fine because it helps me get up. It’s really no inconvenience at all.”

Since construction on the West Campus Residential Initiative began in 2003, the “Class of” halls have all been demolished and three of the five new residential dorms — Cook, Becker and Bethe — now house students.

Construction on the remaining two houses was originally set to be completed in 2010, but is now scheduled for August 2008.