 |
Having outgrown its current home, Malott Hall, and with an urgent need to upgrade its educational infrastructure, the Johnson Graduate School of Management is spending $38 million to restyle what was once a residence hall for women into a home that will raise its stake in the highly competitive field of awarding MBAs.
Sage Hall, built in 1873, represents the future of the Johnson School and perhaps the future of graduate business education. It will be state-of-the-art in every way: wired from floor to ceiling with the latest technology, with a fully operational trading room to mimic those found in Wall Street investment firms and dozens of meeting rooms and spaces for student groups and corporate recruiters. Plans are for the Johnson School to move into Sage Hall by the summer of 1998.
"The building provides us with an advantage among our peer institutions in that it will be a wonderful attraction for incoming students," said Johnson School Dean Robert Swieringa. "But the building is much more than an attraction. It will help us to define what the management education is all about."
To some on campus, the Johnson School is coming to the rescue of Sage Hall, which faced an uncertain future. The building needed upgrades to meet fire and building codes and costly work to repair areas where it had deteriorated. The university studied what to do with Sage Hall for many years without coming to a conclusion until the Johnson School said it would commit millions to renovate the building.
"It really was a perfect solution to the predicament the university faced with Sage Hall," said John McKeown, director of business operations for the Johnson School. "We wanted to stay on central campus and here was this building in need of repair."
The Johnson School, which will gain 60 percent more space in the new facility, is restoring three of Sage's six main exterior walls, removing the interior and digging deeper to create more classroom space. Sage's exterior will get a thorough cleansing. All mortar joints will be replaced, the brick and masonry will be washed and all wood trim restored, refinished and repaired. The spire that stood atop Sage's west tower will be replicated and placed into position by crane. The original spire was destroyed in a storm in the 1940s. Greenhouses, which lined the east side of Sage Hall in its early days, also will be replicated and added on to Sage Hall along East Avenue.
The interior, however, will retain few of Sage's original features. The ground floor will feature seven amphitheater classrooms, student lockers, lounges and student club office space. The first floor will house the Executive Education Center, comprising classrooms and conference rooms and other offices. (Currently the Johnson School's executive education offices are located in guest rooms at the Statler Hotel.)
Administrative offices will be on the second floor along with an expanded career services center with interview rooms. Offices for faculty and Ph.D. candidates, a faculty lounge and seminar and conference rooms will be on the third and fourth floors.
The centerpiece of the new Sage Hall will be a three-story atrium occupying the central courtyard. A skylight, 60 feet by 90 feet, will bathe the atrium in natural light, and glass blocks embedded in the floor will permit sunlight to filter into the basement.
A steel retention system anchored five feet into bedrock supported the exterior walls of the building while the interior was removed during the past year. Inside Sage, the framework of various offices and study spaces is now taking shape. By the end of summer, construction crews hope to have the building "tight" to allow work to proceed indoors during the inclement weather of fall and winter.
"This project has really taken a lot of careful planning and a great deal of engineering expertise to ensure that Sage's exterior walls and mansards were stable enough to withstand the interior work," said Bob Stundtner, the university's project manager.
Giving old Cornell buildings an updated interior is nothing new: Morrill Hall and, currently, Olive Tjaden Hall are two recent examples of such work on campus. The Hillier Group, which was selected to design the new Sage Hall, has managed the restoration of many historic buildings and has designed facilities for other educational institutions. Hillier's lead architect on the project is former Cornell architecture faculty member Alan Chimacoff '64, who as a student designed a piece of concrete sculpture that now stands in the Cornell Plantations.
A major delay in obtaining steel pushed the construction schedule off by two weeks, but project managers are certain the building can be ready for occupancy next May.
To some faculty the move to newer quarters cannot come soon enough. "We're just plain crowded here in Malott," said Alan McAdams, associate professor of managerial economics, who has taught in Malott Hall for more than 30 years. But McAdams said he and his colleagues will make do with the cramped quarters for another year, especially in light of what's in store next summer.
"This move to Sage presents the Johnson School with an enormous opportunity," he said. "It puts us at the center of campus and gives us a chance to create the best teaching and research environment possible for our students and faculty."
The campus location of the school's new home, close to the College of Engineering, School of Hotel Administration, School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Law School, can only strengthen the collaborations between management students and those in the other professional schools, McAdams said.
Today teaching and research need access to the latest technology; while Johnson School officials are still examining what technology to purchase, the renovated Sage Hall will be able to accommodate just about anything that computes and communicates.
"We're making sure that the data infrastructure throughout the building will be compatible with a whole array of technology options," McKeown said, "so that when we ultimately decide what technology we need, we'll be able to make it fit. The cabling and the way it is being laid throughout the building also will enable us to have more efficient upgrades when our needs change."
McKeown, members of the faculty and Cornell Information Technology technicians are traveling to other graduate management schools and to corporate sites to see what technologies are supporting both industry and education. McKeown recently visited Columbia University, which is constructing a new building for its management school, and IBM.
Alumni and friends of the school have contributed more than $31.5 million toward the project. "Contributions have come from several hundred alumni, giving anything from $5 to $15 million," said Steve Sharratt, assistant dean of external relations for the Johnson School.
The $15 million gift -- the largest to date for the project -- was given by Samuel C. Johnson '50, for whom the school is named, and his wife, Imogene Powers Johnson '52. Samuel C. Johnson is chairman of S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., also known as S.C. Johnson Wax, one of the world's largest and most successful family-owned businesses.
Johnson School officials have decided to keep the Sage Hall name for the building; other spaces will be named for major benefactors.
"The renovation of Sage Hall is an appropriate metaphor for the Johnson School," said Dean Swieringa. "We're taking the best components of the past and combining them with the best of what the future has to offer. The outcome will benefit and strengthen the Johnson School's award-winning faculty, nationally recognized programs and top-quality students in ways we have yet to realize."