The Charles B. Wang Center, an Asian-inspired cultural center on SUNY Stony Brook's campus, was a hotbed of activity yesterday as workers attended to last-minute details to ready the center for today's public unveiling.

Six years after Wang, the founder and chairman of Computer Associates International, announced his intention to build and donate the center that now bears his name, the grand opening today promises pageantry and pomp. Gov. George Pataki is scheduled to join Wang and university president Shirley Strum Kenny to sign papers turning over the $40-million-plus center - the largest donation from an individual to the SUNY system.

The interior of the 120,000-square-foot steel structure is distinctive with its gray brick facade accented by red columns at its three entrances. It is spread out over four acres, revealing vast spaces for artwork exhibitions, gardens and ponds, and decorative touches evoking Asian cultures.

Wang said in an interview yesterday he wanted to provide students with an "introduction to Asian culture." But by no means, he said, is the center just for Asian or Asian-Americans students, who make up about 23 percent of Stony Brook's 22,000-member student body.

Kenny said the center will "celebrate Asian and American cultures" and benefit the entire university community through its role as a cultural center hosting lectures and seminars on a variety of subjects, art exhibits, performances and the like.

"It will be a place where students, faculty and staff can gather, where ... people can come together, for example, for lunch" in a still-to-be-completed, 300-seat food court that is to boast five Asian cuisines, Kenny said. "It will not be a classroom facility. It will be a place for what happens outside the classroom, in terms of enrichment of education."

Some of the center's features include two lecture halls, several multipurpose rooms, a 250-seat theater, and touches of greenery throughout, not to mention terraced gardens covering about 35,000 square feet outside, featuring bamboo trees and a dozen other species from Asia. Several ponds are a defining point of the interior architecture that Kenny hopes will invite conversation and reflection.

A prominent feature is the octagonal light tower, spiraling up 100 feet from within the building's core. "Basically, it's a slender or tall element" that is an abstraction of a pagoda, a common architectural design of Asian temples, said architect P.H. Tuan, whose firm is based in Oyster Bay. "We didn't want to copy any one style, so we made an abstract sculpture."

The center's vastness of space and light are apparent, particularly through what Tuan calls its "screen walls. You really don't see the outside, [though] the light shines through."

The center is more than four times the size Wang originally proposed, enlarged, he said, to provide more space to display art. "So the thing kept expanding. The dream sort of takes on a life of its own."

The only artwork on display now is on loan from Wang: a bronze set of two chariots commissioned by the Chinese government - modeled after the originals found at the site of the ancient Terra Cotta Soldiers' excavations in China.

Wang said the center grew out of a desire to give "something special," "something extra" to a public institution. Wang, a Chinese immigrant, graduated from such an institution - Queens College.

"I wanted [to donate] something that normally you wouldn't do," Wang said.

Wang described feeling "overwhelmed" when he last saw the center in August - only his second visit. Clearly pleased, he said, "I can't even describe it."