Rawls College Beaming at Topping Out Ceremony

Allen McInnes, dean of the Rawls College of Business, was beaming like a proud parent as one of the last beams of the new business administration building was hoisted to the top of the nearly-complete steel infrastructure May 13.

“When I came here 10 years ago on a five-year contract, my assignment was to double our endowment and get this building built,” McInnes said. “It is not a small project, but now here we are, topping out this new historic building.”

The building, located west of Dan Law Field on the site of the old Thompson and Gaston Halls, will serve as an anchor for a new North Campus Gateway that will be an entrance to the campus from the Marsha Sharp Freeway.

Undergraduate classrooms, which will be located in the lower level and look out onto a basement-level open-air patio, will be completed in time for students to begin attending classes in the fall of 2011, McInnes said. The building is designed to handle about 3,600 undergraduate students and about 1,000 graduate students.

Room to Grow

McInnes said that, in accordance with the university’s goal of 40,000 students enrolled by 2020, a planned additional wing will raise the new building’s capacity to 4,000 undergraduates and 1,200-1,500 graduate students as the Rawls College enrollment grows to that level.

Ground level will include administrative offices, an auditorium and a spacious student area. The second floor includes graduate-level offices and classrooms, and amenities to facilitate the college’s growing graduate programs, such as executive education, MBA for Physicians and an expanded doctoral program. The new building also is designed to keep pace with technology and will include digital display technologies, LCD screens, laptop connections and wireless network capabilities.

Green by Design

The demolition of Thompson and Gaston Halls, begun in the fall of 2008, included asbestos abatement of the entire facility, utility tunnel abatement and demolition, and restoration of the site. The groundbreaking last October began construction of the 150,000 square-foot LEED-certified building. The LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System^TM is a voluntary, consensus-based standard to support and certify successful green building design, construction and operations.

The original College of Business building will be renovated and developed into a multipurpose classroom facility. As workers begin asbestos abatement, temporary buildings are going up on the north side of the current Rawls building to replace office space a floor at a time as the abatement continues.

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