Northwestern’s Kellogg School to Debut in 2016
EVANSTON, Ill. — Construction on Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management building is well underway after breaking ground in November 2013. The five-story, 415,000-square-foot building will serve as a global hub for the school, and is slated for completion in late 2016.
The new facility will be located on the Evanston campus and will serve as a home for the Kellogg MBA program and the Department of Economics (within the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences). Both are currently located in the Jacobs Center, which Gordon I. Segal, chair of the trustees’ Educational Properties Committee, said at the new facility’s ground breaking was not up to standards.
The selected site, northeast of the Kellogg Allen Center, gives the new building spectacular views of the campus, Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline. Toronto-based KPMB Architects designed the building to incorporate these views using several floor-to-ceiling windows on each level to create a sort of atrium space flooded with natural light.
Designed to facilitate flexibility and collaboration, the building also reflects the university’s interdisciplinary approach to teaching and researching business in the 21st century, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Dean Sarah Mangelsdorf said at the ground breaking. The planning team even made visits to the headquarters of companies such as Google and Pixar to learn more about creating spaces that support collaborative learning and innovation. San Francisco-based Strategy&, a consulting firm formerly known as Booz & Company, helped in the early conceptualization process.
“Weinberg College’s department of economics faculty and students will benefit enormously from the continued collaboration with Kellogg,” Mangelsdorf said in a statement. “This building will house some of the most exciting work being done in economic theory and development, and will foster a culture of analysis and innovation, critical thought and creative expression for a new generation of leaders in the business and economics communities.”
The new building will include classrooms, flexible learning environments, faculty and administrative offices, community gathering spaces and food service. It will serve as a flexible, multi-faceted space that can be easily reconfigured so that lecture-style classrooms can become large seminar rooms and offices can become study spaces. The building’s two-story, 6,600-square-foot conservatory stands out as a destination for business and civic leaders from around the globe. The space will be able to accommodate 250 people for dinners or 350 people for speeches and presentations.
“This building is going to send a big message about the future of education, especially with schools of management,” said Bruce Kuwabara, founding partner of KPMB Architects, at the ground breaking. “You don’t want to be just another business school. You want to breach the paradigm, and that’s what Kellogg has done.”
The facility is designed to achieve at least LEED Silver. The university worked closely with KPMB and German energy consultant Transolar to design a building envelope that will reduce energy consumption by more than 45 percent versus a typical building. Perhaps the building’s biggest sustainable element is a geothermal system consisting of 70 wells drilled almost 600 feet into the bedrock that will provide as much as 60 percent of the heating and cooling for the building.
Other energy-efficient features include LED lighting, lighting automation, light-harvesting using automated shades, triple-glazed windows and radiant cooling using chilled beams. Low-flow water fixtures will also be used throughout the building, and a 2,000-gallon cistern will capture rainwater for irrigation. Water runoff will be reduced through permeable paving and bioswales, which protect the local ecosystem through trapping and filtering pollutants before entering the watershed.