Haas School To Add $60 Million Building

UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business today (Dec. 4) said it is constructing a new $60 million academic building devoted to student learning and interaction. The six-story structure, to be funded with private donations from alumni and friends of the school, is expected to open in the fall of 2016.

The school said that the nearly 80,000-square-foot North Academic Building will serve as a learning laboratory featuring state-of-the art technology and flexible spaces aimed at transforming the student experience. The building will contain many group study rooms, flexible classrooms, an indoor/outdoor café, a large event space with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. The building will be able to adapt to new forms of educational technology and learning.

“This new academic building will readily support and improve both on-campus and technology-enabled learning for our undergraduate and graduate students and enable the school to keep pace with rapid changes in the delivery of management education,” said Rich Lyons, dean of the Haas School, in a statement.

ALUMNI PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN MAKING THE BUILDING POSSIBLE

“The goal of the new facility is to create the best, most up-to-date learning experience for our students. It’s all about them,” added Lyons. “The building also creates a place that will enhance our ability to teach innovative leadership concepts to our students, by providing abundant space for them to collaborate with one another as they learn in teams, and rooms for them to engage in applied innovation learning activities. This is at the core of what differentiates the Berkeley-Haas education.”

The school said that Haas alumni have played a key role in making the building possible. Ned Spieker, BS 66, managing partner of the private real estate firm Spieker Partners, was the school’s lead partner for developing the vision for this building. The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund; Robert G. O’Donnell, BS 65 and MBA 66, retired senior VP and director of Capital Research and Management Company; and the late Barclay Simpson, BS 43, who founded and chaired Simpson Manufacturing Co.; among others, also have contributed significant gifts to the campaign.

The building will provide an additional 858 classroom seats through a variety of classroom sizes and styles. By removing tiered seating, the eight larger classrooms can easily convert to flat, flexible use rooms or new classroom designs in the future. Each classroom has the infrastructure to provide video streaming and capture as well as video teleconferencing.

• The North Academic Building contains:
•  8 tiered lecture rooms
• 4 flat, flexible-use space for experiential learning
• 28 team-based study rooms
• an indoor/outdoor café
• lounge areas with configurable seating
• a 300-seat event space with sweeping views of campus and the San Francisco Bay

The North Academic Building was designed by Perkins+Will. The global architecture firm is known for its innovative and award-winning designs including for clients in higher education. Vance Brown Builders, of Palo Alto, Calif., is the general contractor.