This post was written by Hatchet reporter Anneke Ball.

A local advisory group backed the D.C. Preservation League’s application to designate portions of the interior of the Corcoran school’s 17th street building as protected on Wednesday night.

Next week, the Historic Preservation Board will hold a hearing to consider an application from the D.C. Preservation League and Save the Corcoran to designate parts of the interior of the building as historic. Officials from GW will attend that hearing to challenge the application because they say it will limit the renovations they’re able to make to the building.

Members of the D.C Preservation League said at Wednesday’s Foggy Bottom and West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting that the building should be protected because of “its association with events that have made significant contributions to the broad patterns of our history”.

ANC chairman Patrick Kennedy said commissioners decided to endorse the proposal so that the historic spaces” will be subject to a high level of scrutiny should GW want to make alterations to them.”

The University still wants to make renovations to the building to expand classroom space, update study spaces and add more bathrooms. At a meeting earlier this month, officials said the proposal also designates the basement and second-floor galleries as historic, which limits GW’s ability to make upgrades.

Renovations to the 118-year-old building will also include bringing it up to code and fixing aging heating and cooling systems. In total, renovations will cost about $80 million.

But at the ANC meeting Deputy General Counsel Charles Barber said the University does agree that certain spaces in the 17th Street building, like the rotunda and the atrium on the first floor, are “worthy of recognition.”

“GW recognizes the importance of Corcoran as an iconic building,” he said. “It was built as a museum and as a school.”