The Bowling Green State University was founded as a normal school—a place where early 20th-century high school graduates in Ohio were taught to teach. Today, the public university has more than 20,000 students on its campus, located about 15 miles south of Toledo. The latest sign of Bowling Green’s impressive growth comes with the newly opened Maurer Center, which houses the Allen W. and Carol M. Schmidthorst College of Business. The project included the renovation of Hanna Hall, one of the school's earliest buildings, located on its original quad, and a 50,000-square-foot addition designed by the Chicago office of Perkins&Will, in collaboration with local firm the Collaborative.
P&W design principal Joe Connell says that the business school’s dean, Raymond Braun, a nontraditional academic trained as an attorney, wanted to create a workplace approach to the college of business, meaning that it needed to reflect the qualities and aspirations, as well as the look, feel, and vibrancy, of companies like Google, Deloitte, Microsoft, and Amazon. “We needed to minimize the contrast between the academy and the working world,” Connell says. “We wanted to build that transparency and create organization space at every opportunity.”
The design team intended the addition to maintain a certain continuity with the historic Hanna Hall: They used similar brick, limestone, and glass for the new building, matched the three-story height of the older structure, and in increasing the footprint of the new center, respected the symmetry of the original hall. The center’s signature space is a three-story-tall atrium that spotlights Hanna Hall’s rear façade as the dominant feature. But the overall articulation of the addition, even if defers in some ways to the historic building, stands in sharp contrast the modest and classically inspired forms of the original.
P&W and the Collaborative deployed the idea of “dispersed environments”—intentionally locating the programmed classrooms throughout the building to encourage interaction and collaboration. “The circulation was part of the program. Seeing and bumping into people was critical,” P&W design principal Bryan Schabel, AIA, says. The design is based on “a subtle boldness that really lets the student, faculty and staff’s work and efforts show,” adds P&W associate principal Jessica Figenholtz, AIA.
Vertical circulation through the atrium is via a terraced stair between the first and second floors and a smaller sculptural stair between the second and third. A three-story limestone-clad tower houses the elevators, and is outfitted with LED “ticker tapes” that provide information about the market, breaking news, and even the dean’s Twitter feed.
On the first floor, glazed garage doors separate larger gathering spaces from the atrium, and translucent room dividers allow for easy reconfiguration of the spaces. The second and third floors are primarily dedicated to faculty offices, extensively glazed to promote interaction between educators, students, and staff as they navigate the hallways leading to the classrooms located at the building’s extremities. Visitors enter the dean’s suite through a wide balcony within the atrium that sits atop an earlier one-story addition to Hanna Hall.
The atrium is topped by north-facing light scoops; from the ceiling on the north side, a third-floor classroom seems to hang suspended in midair, levitating over the first floor below. The building’s lower two floors are glazed to create expansive views of the adjacent University Hall, the central building in the original campus core. While the center can be accessed from multiple points on any elevation, this glassy wall invites the larger university community to come and participate in the college of business's activities.
In an almost eerie parallel, Hanna Hall’s planning and construction occurred exactly a century ago—from 1916 to 1921, a period that included World War I and the last global pandemic. The new center, after opening in fall 2020, faced the challenges posed by the current pandemic, with the building’s users needing to adhere to social distancing requirements. Bowling Green’s campus safety experts, charged with making any necessary adaptations to the building, found that the design held up without serious modifications. “What makes the building resilient is variety and choice,” Connell says.
Which is an important lesson as we look to business—and life—beyond the pandemic.
