Harvard Business School

When Harvard launched its new "Graduate School of Business Administration" in 1908, it did so with minimal capital investment.  After all, the new school was a stepchild of the Department of Economics, with a five-year lease on life.  The University saw no reason to invest in the School until it had proved itself.

As a result, the Business School lived in borrowed quarters for more than a decade.  Dean Gay's office was in University Hall, which gave him ready access to President Lowell, but separated him from his faculty, whose offices were tucked into various buildings controlled by the Economics faculty.  Lawrence Hall was the home of a Business School "reading room," which combined a quiet study area with a rudimentary business library.  Perkins Hall offered dormitory space to a limited number of Business School students.  When Widener Library opened in 1915, the Business School was allocated space in the new library's top floor.  

But the biggest space-related challenge for the new school was classrooms.  First, some of the Business School's specialized courses, including its sequence of courses related to printing, seemed to require specialized kinds of space.  Although Dean Gay tried for several years to create such a space—which would have combined teaching areas and a full-fledged printing plant, and would have served both the Business School and the "Harvard University Press" for which Gay was advocating—the University balked.  

An even greater challenge, however, was that through the first half of the 1920s, almost all of the School's courses were conducted in borrowed space.  Teaching space was at a premium during the postwar surge, and a growing enrollment underscored the Business School's vulnerability,.  Only two classrooms were available for the exclusive use of the Business School: basement rooms in Lawrence Hall and the Harvard Union.  The School shared nine additional classrooms with other departments, but stood to lose the use of any of them on relatively short notice.  It was a guest in what one College official called a "crowded family," and not always a welcome one.  

As early as 1909—a year after the School's founding—Dean Gay began contemplating a $100,000 fund drive to pay for a self-contained Business School building.  Again, President Lowell was discouraging.  "Money does not come as easily as is often supposed," he wrote to former President Eliot, in describing Gay's ambitious plans for the School.  Not until the second half of the 1920s did the School realize its longtime dream of a freestanding campus, across the Charles River on University-owned land in Allston.  

The construction of the School's new campus took place between June 1925 and October 1926.  Although many of the School's space-related problems were solved as the new campus was built, the classroom challenge was only partially resolved.  For budgetary reasons, the separate classroom-and-auditorium building that had been envisioned along North Harvard Street was cut, the auditorium was abandoned, and the classrooms were moved into Baker Library.  

Although the location of the new classrooms represented a compromise, the rooms themselves did not.  In an impromptu studio set up in Dean Donham's summer home on Cape Cod, Donham, Harvard architecture professor Charles W.  Killam, and architecture student Harry J.  Korslund sketched out a novel classroom designed specifically for the School's "case method" of teaching, with curved rows of fixed chairs seating 177 students, and tiered floors with six-inch risers.  When the School held its first classes in Baker Library—on March 7, 1927—HBS students for the first time sat down in classrooms deliberately designed to support student-centered learning.  

These classrooms served that purpose adequately for the next quarter-century, but they were far from perfect.  Other than the small "wing" attached to one arm of the students' chairs, there were no writing surfaces (and hence, none of the namecards that later would become a fixture of the HBS classroom).  Professors sat behind a curtained barricade on a riser at the front of the classroom, which meant that they were effectively walled off from their students.  Brick and cinderblock walls made for poor acoustics, and lighting was uneven.  

A second postwar student population boom—this time in the wake of World War II—led the School to revisit its classrooms.  In his 1945 report to Harvard's president, Dean Donald David called for the construction of a separate classroom building and dining facility, both to serve an expanding community and to improve the design of the School's classrooms.  Harvard authorized a $20 million fundraising drive for this purpose in 1948.  In the same year, John D.  Rockefeller, Jr.  pledged $5 million toward the proposed buildings if an additional $5 million could be raised by July 1950.  In response to this challenge grant, David and his colleagues raised a total of $12.1 million, including a $2 million grant from the Kresge Foundation, and gifts from 45 companies and 1,500 individuals.  

With the money for a new classroom building—to be called "Aldrich Hall," in honor of Nelson Aldrich, Rockefeller's wife's father—in hand, a new challenge now arose: how to design those classrooms.  Beginning in the spring of 1950, a seven-person "Planning Committee for Aldrich Hall" (including five faculty members and two administrators) took responsibility for thinking through the overall building, the allocation of spaces within it, and the design of its classrooms.  The committee submitted its report to Dean David on November 1, 1950.  After describing how many classrooms of what sizes would be needed in a variety of possible scenarios, the report focused on "functional specifications" for those classrooms.  Most important, they said, was that the "building should be designed to implement the case method of instruction," which they described as a "triangular discussion."

Included in the report were sketches and photographs of a number of classrooms across the country about which members of the committee had obtained detailed information.  These ranged from rooms built by companies (Caterpillar Tractor), schools (Southern Methodist University), and non-profits (the United Nations).  

The committee urged that the School hire an architect who would attack the challenges of Aldrich with "zeal and enthusiasm," and who would be "willing to work closely with the faculty in conceiving room interiors which will meet the particular problems of the case method of instruction."  In addition, the report suggested that the School, working closely with the architect, build a full-scale mock-up of a classroom and test it during the spring of 1951, in anticipation of construction beginning later that year.  

The proposed mock-up was constructed in the parking lot behind Baker Library and was put into use on April 23, 1951.  Over the subsequent five weeks, both students and faculty were polled regularly on various aspects of the model classroom, which was tweaked from week to week. Gradually, the room improved, except for the acoustics (which suffered from the temporary nature of the mock-up's provisional walls and ventilation system) and the overhead lighting scheme.  But by the time Aldrich Hall was dedicated in June 1953, these problems and other problems had been resolved, and the seventeen Aldrich classrooms set a new standard for infrastructure to support student-centered learning.  Focused on the intensity of the HBS classroom experience, not many students wondered where those classrooms had come from.  

Almost four decades later, in the late 1990s, the School again faced the need to construct new classroom facilities, this time in Hawes Hall, funded with a gift from Rodney A. Hawes (MBA '69) and his wife Beverly.  Hawes Hall was intended to house eight classrooms that would, first, incorporate new teaching technologies; second, provide an inventory of somewhat smaller case-method classrooms; and third, improve upon the basic Aldrich design, which in some ways had fallen behind the times.  Once again, the School's planners decided to build a mock-up of the proposed classroom, and test it with the help of faculty and students in real teaching situations.  Every detail of the classroom design—down to and including the qualities of the student namecards—was scrutinized.  

Whether or not to have windows in the classroom was a hot debate while Hawes was being planned.  To minimize interior load-bearing walls, Aldrich's corridors ran along the outside walls and its classrooms were located in the middle of the building,.  The result had been 18 classrooms without windows.  In the ensuing decades, many faculty had concluded that the lack of windows actually enhanced the classroom experience, and argued against their inclusion in Hawes.  Others argued for their (careful) inclusion.  The result was a compromise: windows that would be strategically positioned to allow indirect light into the room, but that would not present distractions.  In addition, faculty would have full control over the amount of light coming into the classroom.  

Hawes Hall opened in 2002, and it quickly became clear that some of its "front of the classroom" innovations should be migrated back into the larger Aldrich building.  Again, a mock-up of sorts was created—this time within one of the existing Aldrich classrooms.  And again, every aspect of the learning experience was reexamined with an eye toward potential improvements.  In this case, the design team also had to figure out a way to renovate all 17 Aldrich classrooms without taking too many of the rooms offline during the academic year—meaning that construction had to be concentrated in the summer months over three years.  The project began in May 2004 and ended in September 2006.