Six months after a formal groundbreaking ceremony, the university began construction this week on the parking garage below the planned McDonough School of Business Center, which the university hopes to open in January 2009.
Though the university still has not acquired the permits necessary to begin construction on the building itself, workers began installing steel beams and wood planks along the perimeter of the site, located of the west side of Lot T between the Leavey Center and the Multi-Sport Facility.
Karen Frank, vice president for facilities and student housing, said that the university received permission in recent weeks to begin underground work. She said that university applied over a year ago for the permits necessary to begin construction on the building but that approval is still pending.
Frank said that the project must still be approved by the Old Georgetown Board and the Commission on Fine Arts.
“There are approximately 32 approvals in all,” Frank said.
The roughly 170,000-square-foot building, which has yet to be named, will be the main academic building for the MSB. It will be five stories tall and house a 370-seat auditorium, 15 classrooms, 15 conference rooms, as well as faculty offices, interview rooms and “breakout” rooms.
“It will be a signature building that will denote [the SB],” said Virginia Flavin, the MSB’s director of facilities planning and special events. “The identity of the business school students will be greatly enhanced by this building.”
Flavin said that the building will help improve the business school’s status among the nation’s top business schools. The MSB was ranked 23rd among undergraduate business schools in the 2007 edition of U.S. News and World Report.
The new office space will allow the MSB to hire additional faculty and administrators, and rooms in the building will be equipped with the newest technology, Flavin said.
“We plan to make it state-of-the-art to the extent that it makes sense in an educational environment,” Flavin said. The SB is still at least two years away from purchasing equipment for the building, she said, and has yet to decide specifically what it will purchase.
Flavin said that the “breakout” rooms in particular will play an integral role in the business school’s academic development, serving as quiet spaces for MSB students to collaborate with peers on group projects.
“It is important for business students to experience what they will in the real world,” Flavin said.
The building will be connected to the Leavey Center by a large staircase, which Frank compared to the Spanish Steps in Rome. The steps may also connect the two buildings to the university’s planned science center, which will be constructed next to the MSB center on the eastern half of Lot T.
Officials estimate that the MSB building will cost around $82.5 million, most of which has already been raised through alumni donations, Flavin said.
