Project Description:
Intended as a gift to the University of Utah Business School and named after the venerable Harvard Business School Professor C. Roland Christensen, this building is the embodiment of his revolutionary teaching methods.
Christensen’s early experiments in case method teaching led to several iterations of the classroom which best facilitate this. The current Harvard model was accepted as the base line design. During building of this facility, maximum efforts were therefore made to incorporate this Harvard model without modification. In addition to four 80-student case method classrooms, there are two large seminar rooms, an electronic and computer-based resource library, and numerous team discussion study rooms.
The entire building was designed to encourage and facilitate learning through the continuation of dialogue and discussion that begins in, and is intrinsic to, the classroom designed for case method. To enable students to carry this discussion forward even further, a full-service dining facility was included. The center was conceived as the new “front door” to the Business School from the major north-south pedestrian mall. Its principal stair in the large entry takes one to the other Business School buildings a level above the mall. This “entry” was designed to establish a mood and sense of what the Business School is about and what it can be in the lives of students.
