PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 9, Nov. 3, 2005

Campaign to fund instructional building for College of Business

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

Click photo to enlarge Illustration courtesy Cesar Pelli and Associates Business better than usual The proposed College of Business instructional building, to be built at the corner of Sixth Street and Gregory Drive, will contain many environmentally friendly features to enhance energy efficiency and cost effectiveness. Campus officials intend for the building, designed by UI alumnus Cesar Pelli, to obtain certification by the U.S. Green Building Council and serve as the benchmark for future buildings.

The College of Business is more than three-fourths of the way to its goal of raising $75 million.

The college has raised about $60 million since launching its Investing in Excellence Campaign for Business Education at Illinois in March 2004. The campaign will fund construction of a new instructional building, double the college’s endowment for named chairs, support programmatic initiatives and research, and fund student scholarships and fellowships. The campaign also will provide $8 million for the College of Business Annual Fund, a discretionary fund overseen by Dean Avijit Ghosh.

About $62 million will go toward construction of a 160,000-square-foot instructional building at the corner of Sixth Street and Gregory Drive. The building was designed by Cesar Pelli, a renowned architect who is a 1954 graduate of the UI School of Architecture, former dean of the Yale School of Architecture and recipient of a distinguished alumnus award from the UI Alumni Association in 1995.

The building will include a three-story commons area for formal receptions and informal gatherings. Student lounges and study areas on the first and third floors will encourage students to interact.

“One of the things that we want to do in the College of Business is cultivate the concept of collaboration and teamwork, and the new building is designed to do that,” said John Hedeman, assistant dean. “I think that the students and faculty are going to be very excited by it and will see the educational benefits of it right away.”

Currently, the college holds classes for its 3,000 undergraduates and 850 graduate students in nine different buildings on campus, and the 20 classrooms in the new building will allow the college to congregate classes there, in David Kinley Hall and in Wohlers Hall. Many of the new building’s state-of-the-art classrooms will be wired for teleconferencing and laptop computer use. A Market Information Laboratory will allow students to engage in hands-on exercises that mimic real business situations. The four-story building also will contain faculty offices and a home base for the Illinois MBA program on the third floor, with classrooms, student services, meeting space and lounges.

The building’s 300-seat auditorium will be named in honor of the professional services firm Deloitte, which contributed $2 million. Several other high-profile corporate partners have contributed large gifts, including the auditing/tax-consulting firm KPMG, which donated $1 million that will be used to help construct a suite of offices and meeting and conference rooms to house the Center for International Education and Research in Accountancy. The professional services firm Ernst & Young LLP donated $2 million to establish the Ernst & Young Center for Career Advancement, a suite of offices, meeting rooms and 24 interview rooms with a resource center for job hunters.

An Accountancy Student Center with information resources and workspace for students, prospective students, alumni and corporate visitors is being funded with a $2.5 million gift from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The campaign also will support the college’s honors program, which was started last year and offers students leadership and international experiences that they can build upon — and that they will encourage other students to engage in as well – to be better prepared for the corporate world, Hedeman said. This year’s group of 47 students, who were recruited by last year’s group of 29 students, will job-shadow corporate executives during winter break and visit businesses and government financial agencies in Germany and Poland at the end of May to learn about the integration of the European Union and the global implications for business and government.

The new building will be noteworthy because it will be the university’s first sustainable building, designed to be 40 to 50 percent more energy efficient than similar buildings on campus through use of triple-pane windows, a thermodynamic air-displacement system and a greater amount of insulation. Other environmentally friendly features that will help reduce operating costs include solar panels on the auditorium roof, exterior windows in most rooms and photo sensors that adjust lighting gradually in response to daylight. A roof overhang will reduce glare and heat from the sun, as will rooftop vegetation and minimal paving around the building.

Campus officials aim for the building to qualify for certification as a green building with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Construction is scheduled to begin in February or March, with a groundbreaking ceremony scheduled for April. The new building should be ready for occupancy by fall 2008.

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