Johnson School celebrates the 'rebirth of Sage'

Trustee Jeffrey P. Parker speaks to both the crowd gathered in Sage Hall's atrium and to Johnson School alumni at a linked site in San Francisco (one of four remote locations joining in the event) during Sage Hall dedication ceremonies Oct. 3. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Can a 19th-century landmark find relevance in the digital age on the brink of the millennium? Make that a resounding yes, if the building is Sage Hall, which was officially dedicated as the new home of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management on Oct. 3.

As if to prove the point, the dedication ceremonies in the building's striking Margaret M. and Charles H. Dyson Atrium included an 8-by-12-foot PictureTel screen mounted on the north wall that linked campus celebrants with well wishers on both coasts. Alumna Kelly Ames, MBA '86, in San Francisco sent congratulations "from the heart of Silicon Valley," and members of the Johnson School Club of Boston sang a vigorous "Happy Birthday" and predicted that the Red Sox would beat the Indians and go on to play the Yankees in the next round of the baseball playoffs (they didn't and won't).

Confetti cannons blasted, and faculty, students, alumni and friends cheered as President Hunter Rawlings pronounced "the rebirth of Sage" and predicted that its reopening would bring about "an infusion of new ideas that will make the entire university, not just the Johnson School, an even more exciting and deeply intellectual place."

"Sage was built brick by brick to last," said Robert J. Swieringa, the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Johnson School. "What has lasted is not just a great building but a great vision and long-standing values," among them coeducation and nonsectarianism. "The world has changed dramatically since Sage first opened its doors in 1875, but those values have not. What the new building has given us is a new sense of energy."

During the two-year renovation, the building's historic exterior was scrubbed but left virtually unaltered. The interior, however, was gutted and replaced with an entirely new one, fully networked and wired for tomorrow's technology, with high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable and the potential to connect with trading rooms around the globe.

Swieringa joked that the restoration had temporarily compromised the Johnson School faculty's frequently touted open-door policy, "when we discovered that the new office doors shut automatically," but the problem was resolved by installing old-fashioned doorstops.

The initial cost of the building in 1873--75 was $250,000 (about $34 million in today's dollars, according to the school's calculations) and was paid for entirely by Henry Sage, a prosperous lumber mill owner and state legislator. The restoration, which cost $38.2 million, was supported by gifts to the school from hundreds of alumni and friends, many of whom were in attendance at a special ceremony Friday afternoon that honored their generosity. Among those lauded were Samuel C. Johnson, who with his family gave $20 million to endow the school in 1984 (the school is named for Johnson's great-grandfather, the founder of the firm known as S.C. Johnson Wax).

In his talk during dedication weekend, Alan Chimacoff '64, the chief architect of the Hillier Group, the firm that engineered the building's transformation, pointed admiringly to Sage's balustrades, turrets and dormers, whose visual pattern suggests the rhyming sequences of a Shakespearean sonnet. Retaining the building's poetry while transforming Sage into a facility fully equipped for the 21st century was Chimacoff's challenge.

The building's original architect, Charles Babcock, Cornell's first professor of architecture, modeled Sage on the Oxford University museum. Chimacoff turned to that building's great exposition hall for inspiration, in particular the diamond shaped panes of its glass roof, which he imitated in the atrium's ceiling. Taking pains to "preserve the story of the building," he made sure that Sage's restored dimensions adhered to its original footprint. Granite floor tiles were chosen to suggest ones found in the crypt of Sage Chapel, another Babcock building. A 19th-century conservatory and greenhouse for the study of botany was reinterpreted as a sun-filled library study space. And the windows on an enclosed reading porch were glazed to look like the open balcony that had been there a century ago.

Initially built as a college for women in keeping with Cornell's founding fathers' vision of equal access to education, Sage continued to serve as a women's dormitory through the 1950s but later fell into disrepair as a multi-use building. Helen Kramer '57, whose husband, Ron, earned an MBA at the school in 1957, remembers living in Sage as a student and said that Janet Reno was a fellow resident. Touring the building during dedication weekend, Kramer was taken aback at first to see modern offices where her bedroom had once been but was "thrilled at how well the building turned out."

Four former deans of the school, William Carmichael, David Thomas, Curtis Tarr and Alan Merten, viewed a film on the school's history and recalled their own tenures here. Begun in 1946 as the School of Business and Public Administration, the business school initially was housed in McGraw Hall, where it shared space with Cornell's collection of dinosaur bones. In 1964 it moved to Malott Hall, where it was not immune from the campus unrest of the era. In the early 1980s, dissension came from within when a task force of alumni advisers recommended that the school drop its public and health administration programs, which suffered from low enrollment. The faculty voted to let go of the programs, which were later adopted by other Cornell units. In the mid- to late-1980s a capital campaign more than doubled the $20 million gift from the Johnson family, giving the school its first substantial endowment.

Dedication weekend was launched with Citicorp and Citibank CEO John Reed's Hatfield lecture (see story above) and featured topical talks by faculty members and alumni. A sampling: Richard Marin, MBA '76, senior managing partner of Bankers Trust, shared his pessimism about the future of the euro, the new pan-European currency, and the spread of the Asian economic crisis; Professor Robert Frank proposed a way to derail out-of-control consumerism and benefit society and ourselves.

The Johnson School, which is rated by peers as among the top 20 business schools in the nation, has accelerated self-assessment and improvement efforts in the past few years. The school inaugurated a 12-month MBA option for students with advanced scientific or technical degrees (most MBA programs are two years). It has developed "immersion" courses in manufacturing management, brand management, investiment banking and corporate finance. It has established the Parker Center for Investment Research, which allows
students to do real-time financial analysis with the same software that Wall Street analysts use. And it now offers the Park Leadership Program, an innovative approach to training business leaders.

The new initiatives, along with the renovated building, should give the Johnson School a more competitive stance and ensure that it follows through on Swieringa's closing remark, which echoes an earlier era when new technology fired people's imaginations. Repeating the first spoken words in a Hollywood movie, "The Jazz Singer," he told the crowd: "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"