Base Engineering Inc. of Allentown helped break ground on
Sunday on what will be a 25,000-square-foot expansion to a Monroe County Hindu
retreat, a project the engineering firm has worked on for nearly two years.
The expansion to Arsha Vidya Gurukulam includes a lecture/dining
hall, which can accommodate up to 500 people. The site work will begin in about
a week, Amit Mukherjee, president and principal engineer at Base Engineering,
said this morning. Site work will take four to six months to complete, and
construction will take an additional three to four months.
“This is a much bigger facility,” Mukherjee said. “One of
the beauties of this design is we estimated what the future needs of the
project will be, and the approval process will be a lot more efficient in future.”
There are two general contractors for the project,
Mukherjee said. Parzych Construction of Quakertown will handle most of the
construction, including plumbing, heating, ventilation and electric. S and S
Homes of Saylorsburg will handle the site work, roofing and wall painting, he
said.
Established in 1986, the Saylorsburg retreat is patterned
after the ancient gurukulams (schools) of India, with about 26 cottages on a
14.5-acre tract of land.
The retreat is used to teach about the scientific aspects
of the religion. When registrants arrive for educational courses, they live in
the cottages, attend classes and lectures and eat in the dining hall.
Through the years, attendance at the retreat increased
and there was a need for a larger dining/lecture hall.
Mukherjee said Base has been involved with Arsha Vidya
Gurukulam since the early 1990s when the company did engineering and approval
work for upgrades to the cottages.
Source: LVB
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