Page 15 - spaces4learning, Spring 2021

offices the second and third floors. Classes and classrooms were laid out linearly throughout the building, and the larger class- rooms all had fixed seating. Faculty and administration had to fit moveable furniture into smaller classrooms as they could. It was the oldest business school building in the state among its peer group. Dean Braun said that when he was hired in 2012, one of the goals he was given was to get the ball rolling on a new facility.
“We thought we needed to have a more modern, pur- pose-built business building for the campus, and we focused on designing it to facilitate the way we teach,” he said. “So, no fixed-seating classrooms. Seats are moveable in all the class- rooms. Faculty can form groups and teach the students in
PHOTOS CREDIT JAMES STEINKAMP PHOTOGRAPHY
groups; students can teach each other. It’s a very different teach- ing environment.”
Some classrooms have moveable walls and modular furni- ture that let students use the space however they need for group work, product planning, and real-life research. Two classrooms known as “innovation laboratories” were specifically designed and built for discovery-based learning. Students can display information from their laptops on wall-mounted screens. And the data visualization laboratory features a large monitor (span- ning the length of the front wall) that’s made up of 27 separate monitors; it can be operated as one monitor, three 3x3-screen monitors, or 27 separate monitors.
The new technology and flexible learning spaces represent a
spaces4learning.com | SPRING 2021 15