October 24, 2003
Contact: Catherine Walsh
Harvard Business School Communications
(617) 495-6931
BOSTON – Harvard Business School (HBS) has broken ground on a project to restore and expand Baker Library, the stately historic building capped with a bell tower that has been a symbol of the School for over seventy-five years. As part of this renovation, the building—which houses one of the world’s largest business libraries—will also be expanded from 130,000 to 160,000 square feet to include an academic center. The new Baker Library/Academic Center is scheduled to open in 2005.
According to Angela Crispi, associate dean for administration, the Center will be a place that strengthens the intellectual community at HBS. “We envision faculty, students, alumni, and outside scholars coming together to build knowledge,” says Crispi. “We hope to achieve this goal by creating a facility that fosters further collaboration, interaction, and integration among these groups.”
Renovations to the Baker Library building, which originally housed the School’s first classrooms as well as the library when the campus was dedicated on June 4,1927, will give a gentle face-lift to the building’s distinctive façade that faces north to the Charles River and the main Harvard campus. Special attention will also be given to restoring and refurbishing the library’s historic lobby and grand reading room, and to preserving its extensive general and historic collections of books and periodicals in two new underground floors of environmentally controlled stacks.
A state-of-the art conservation laboratory will be constructed to preserve the School’s unique collections of business manuscripts and other archival materials. A new Historical Collections Reading Room will accommodate the needs of researchers using the collections. The renovated lobby will include exhibit space to engage the community in the study and appreciation of the lessons and legacies of business history, the history of the School, and current research of the faculty. Additional exhibit spaces are planned throughout the building.
The Baker Library/Academic Center provides new seminar and conference spaces for faculty, researchers, and visitors, as well as areas for student meetings and discussions such as “The Exchange,” an informal gathering place located immediately inside the building’s new main entrance. This entrance will embrace Boston’s Allston neighborhood to the south, where Harvard University is working in conjunction with community leaders on its plans for future expansion.
An atrium over a central stair hall will bring natural light into the heart of the Baker Library/Academic Center. A total of sixty-six faculty offices will be arrayed along the perimeter of each floor, together with conference rooms and other support services.
Offices for library and academic support staff will be located throughout the building. The Faculty Research Computing Group, the Baker Library Research Services Group, and the Baker Business Information Services Center are brought together in the Baker Library/Academic Center and will improve the synergies among these groups in support of faculty research. The refurbished grand reading room will house the Business Information Services Center and will be the central library service point for the community.
A team of more than a hundred HBS faculty, staff, and MBA and doctoral students began developing the concept for the renovation/expansion with the firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott in the spring of 2001. To come up with the design, HBS tapped Robert A.M. Stern Architects, the firm that designed the School’s Spangler campus center. Stern Architects teamed up with Finegold Alexander & Associates, the group that had previously restored one of HBS’s original dormitories. Skanska USA Building Inc. was selected as the construction manager of the project in March 2002. In the late spring of 2003, a precisely orchestrated migration of library materials and over two hundred people from the building to other buildings on or near campus took place.
During the summer of 2003 – well before classes began – Skanksa demolished some 74,000 square feet of antiquated space on the south side of Baker Library. Construction is being carefully planned to provide the least amount of disturbance to the HBS community and its neighbors in Allston.