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NORTON - Wheaton officials came together Saturday to break ground on a new science building where scientists and others will come together.

The $50 million Center for Scientific Inquiry and Innovation is designed to encourage "faculty and students, students and students, and faculty and faculty" to interact, said Tommy Ratliff, the project's faculty coordinator.

Located next to the existing science center, the new three-story building will have laboratories that promote collaborative, interdisciplinary research, said Ratliff, an associate professor of mathematics.

In other new spaces, students may "hang out and interact with each other and the faculty," he said.

"Fundamentally, this isn't a project about things. It's a project about people," he said. The current science center has fewer and smaller spaces, restricting collaboration to "kind of a makeshift way," Ratliff said.

"When this building was really designed, there wasn't the same emphasis on science," he said.

Construction of the new building will start in March and end in December 2010, he said.

The building will open in the spring of 2011, when first-floor renovations of the existing science center start.

Those renovations are scheduled to be done by the fall of 2011.

Wheaton will fund the project primarily through gifts supplemented by fundraising. The college has raised more than $18 million, college officials said.

The new science center was designed with the future in mind, Ratliff said.

"We don't know where science is going to be in 10, 15, 20 years, but this building needs to serve the college for much longer than that," he said.

The design incorporates glass so that "you'll be able to see the science being done, rather than behind solid walls with solid doors," Ratliff said.

The glass also will allow the building to take advantage of natural lighting, reducing the need for lights, he said. That and other design features, including the roof, will help the building earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification by the U.S. Green Building Council, he said.

MICHAEL GELBWASSER covers Norton for The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0439 or at mgelbwasser@thesunchronicle.com.