Central Oregon Community College is about to shift its construction focus to Redmond.

The college’s next major construction project is the $12.5 million Redmond Technology Education Center. The 30,000-square-foot building will house new programs for Central Oregon, including a high-performance automotive repair training center and the Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence and Development (CEED). The center will also host a program in nondestructive testing and inspection, which will train people to test the strength of structures such as bridges.

COCC now has a rendering of the building, the exterior of which will feature native lava stone and aluminum, among other materials. The two-story building will sit just across from Redmond Airport’s main exit. Groundbreaking is set for summer.

“It’s going to be a beautiful building,” said Karin Hilgersom, COCC’s vice president for instruction. Of the $12.5 million price tag, half will come from state funding, while COCC will pay its share with money from a bond voters approved in 2009.

The bond money has also helped pay for projects in Prineville, Madras and on COCC’s main campus. In recent years, COCC has used the money to build the Junger Culinary Center and help pay for classroom spaces in Madras and Prineville.

This fall, COCC will open about 100,000 square feet of bond-funded classroom and laboratory space in its science and health careers buildings.

The technology center is designed to be a flexible space. One automotive training bay, for instance, may be converted into a training area for unmanned drone repair.

Eric Spieth, who will run the entrepreneurial center, helped design the CEED’s space. Almost nothing will be permanent in this area, with all furniture mounted on wheels and no partitions between desks.

The area is designed to look like a Silicon Valley technology company, Spieth said. There will, for instance, be no barriers between teams of students working on different aspects of a project. Accounting people will sit next to marketing staff, he said.

But there won’t be any pool tables or other off-beat amenities for which tech companies have become famous, Spieth said.

“We want to keep it serious. We’re designing it from the beginning to be incredibly flexible,” he said.