A 87,900-square-foot business center at the University of San Diego will soon be open and ready for student use, after a recent steel topping off at the project site. Sitting directly across the already existing Olin Hall, the new Knauss Center for Business Education will provide USD students with a new place to learn while also incorporating the existing business school.
“We’re building this right adjacent to Olin Hall…Part of the design concept is actually to connect the existing building with the Knauss Center of Business Education,” Paul Schroeder, principal at Delawie, the architecture firm tasked with designing the building, said. “It acts as a circulation path between both buildings and then we have a really beautiful and nicely sized courtyard between the two buildings.”
Construction on the three-story building began in 2019, and once complete will provide students with 23 new classrooms, a 1,200-square-foot financial markets lab, a 1,200-square-foot data analytics lab, board meeting rooms, a 2,600-square-foot auditorium with space for 250 audience members, the 7,300-square-foot Student Success Center and more. The building will also offer facilities for guest speakers and outside groups.
“It’s going to be really flexible, bring in classes, bring in people from outside to present and things like that. It’s sort of a creative space for the school of business folks,” Schroeder said.
Next door, Olin Hall also will receive a 47,000-square-foot renovation. This will include 36 new staff offices totaling 120 square feet each, five 150-square-foot conference rooms, a 950-square-foot faculty community center, a 2,300-square-foot cafe and more. According to Schroeder, Olin Hall will function primarily as a center for business school faculty, while still operating in conjunction with the Knauss Center to form a 120,000 square foot business school complex.
The exterior of the new building is designed to complement the traditional 16th-century Spanish architecture seen throughout the rest of USD’s campus, while still providing a modern, open space for students to learn.
“It’s going to look similar to other buildings on campus in terms of the architecture, but when you get inside, it’s going to have a more contemporary, modern feeling, more open than traditional Spanish 16th century renaissance architecture, which all these buildings look like…the dean was very instrumental in making sure we had that transparency to really see what’s going on,” Schroeder said.
The project was designed by Delawie in conjunction with national design firm Perkins & Will. Operating out of San Diego since 1951, Schroeder said Delawie has provided local guidance to USD stakeholders, while the Minneapolis-based architecture firm will bring extensive experience in the higher education sector.
The architecture firm has designed higher education buildings, with a concentration on business schools, throughout the U.S. and Canada. These include the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, the College of Business at Missouri State University, College of Business Administration at Kent State University and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, among others.
“They have a large number of business schools throughout the country, so they’ve really been our partner through this entire thing. They have the expertise in terms of understanding how business schools come together and the purposefulness of the different class types and student types, so they were really able to help the stakeholder group through that entire process,” Schroeder said.
“I think to talk about the process it’s very important to talk about how instrumental USD’s stakeholder group was, and the dean, in coming up with the vision and guiding the process. We obviously guided the design process but they really understood what they wanted and spent a lot of time with us to get what they wanted…It was really a collaborative effort.”
