Planning the new building required an underlying set of objectives and goals. The overarching objective of the college’s planning group was to create a building that would embody the ideal of a student-centered, public research university. To this end, secondary objectives included a building that would: Enhance learning • Build community • Promote research and interdisciplinarity • Brand the college as a leader in business education.
Enhance learning
- Provide learning spaces for academic programs at each degree level, including undergraduate classrooms of all sizes, quality MBA classrooms that may also serve as executive education classrooms and seminar rooms dedicated to doctoral education.
- Ensure access of all students and faculty to state-of-the-art learning technology and business information systems in classrooms, labs, group study rooms and offices.
- Ensure design flexibility needed to accommodate future changes in program focus, pedagogy and instructional technology.
- Provide technological outreach opportunities including video conferencing, global networking and on-demand video.
Build community
- Encourage students to remain in the building and interact with others by creating a variety of interior and exterior spaces such as a café, outdoor terraces, tutor rooms, team study rooms, a general access lab and an atrium with furniture appropriate for laptop use.
- Provide appropriate spaces for student support services and student organizations.
- Provide spaces, including a faculty lounge, where faculty can gather for conversation and collaboration.
- Provide spaces for faculty and students to meet for learning enhancement.
- Locate departmental chairs in a common area, giving each department its separate identity, but providing shared resources.
- Provide a board room that may be used for various college boards as well as for external boards.
- Be the location of choice for events that connect students and faculty with business practitioners.
- Accommodate selected events of campuswide and community interest and importance.
Promote Research and Interdisciplinarity
- Provide a collegewide faculty floor that dispenses with segregation by discipline and centralizes faculty support services.
- Provide a collegial environment committed to research with quiet, efficient offices filled with natural light.
- Provide space appropriately located and designed for research centers and other outreach functions that routinely interact with the business community.
- Make the center spaces flexible by providing shared resources, but give each center an identity.
Brand the college as a leader in business education
- Design an iconic building that will serve as a key element of the identity of the college and its academic programs.
- Design a contemporary, professional building that clearly communicates it is a college of business.
- Design a building that will distinguish UNT from surrounding competitors as a comprehensive college of business and a destination for an executive education.
- Design a building that will serve as a competitive tool in attracting and retaining prospective students and star faculty.
- Design a building that is LEED-certified and environmentally friendly.
