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The Business School has revealed preliminary master plans for a $185 million construction and redesign project that will remake its Allston campus over the next six to eight years. Assistant dean and chief planning officer Angela Crispi, M.B.A. '90, cites a variety of needs driving the wide-ranging project, which can be broken down into four distinct parts.

First, Baker Library, with its sweeping view across the Charles River to Harvard's Cambridge campus, will acquire a rear entrance--a nod to the fact that many library patrons approach from the south, where the parking lot is located and where a new academic and office building will replace Teele Hall. More importantly, the library will be renovated to become a modern "information center," Crispi says, bringing it up to speed with recent innovations in classroom technology (see "Better Business through Technology," January-February). "We want to make Baker a learning center," she explains, "a meeting place where you go for information in any form."

Also planned are two new dorms for the school's Executive Education Program; they will occupy the lawn between Kresge Hall and Soldiers Field road. Why the need for more dorms when trends in information technology seem to dictate a move away from on-site education? "Actually," says Crispi, "we've found that IT brings people together more frequently." Crispi cites growing demand--the program had 3,000 participants last year--and the need to compete with similar programs elsewhere as motives for the project. She describes the current housing as "sub-optimal." As part of this phase of the plan, Kresge Hall, with its dining facilities (excluding the Faculty Club), will be renovated for the exclusive use of the executive education program.

M.B.A. students will dine at a new, 89,000-square-foot campus center featuring retail space and a 350-seat auditorium. Crispi says the school needs a mid-size auditorium like the one planned; its present auditorium can accomodate 1,000, and its amphitheater-like classrooms hold between 40 and 150 people. The new building, to be located on the south side of the green behind Aldrich Hall, will create an "M.B.A. quad" that is bounded on the east and west by Cumnock and Burden Halls.

Finally, the feasibility of constructing new housing in the vacant lot (now under the authority of Harvard Planning and Real Estate [HPRE]) at the corner of Western Avenue and Soldiers Field Road is presently being analyzed. Tenants would come from graduate schools throughout the University; Crispi says there are no plans to increase enrollment in the M.B.A. program, which has already grown by 75 students as a result of the year-round academic calendar instituted by Dean Kim Clark last year. HPRE is now working with the business school to identify its long-term housing needs.

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