Earlier this month, Shawmut Design and Construction put the finishing touches on its renovation and expansion of the Peter J. Tobin College of Business, a 70,000-sf building located on the Queens, N.Y., campus of St. John’s University.
This building—named after an alumnus and former CFO of Chase Manhattan Bank—first opened in the late 1970s. At a renovation cost of $22 million, this was the largest Higher Ed project to date in New York for Shawmut’s Institutional group. Its 43-week completion schedule included $800,000 in demolition related to a complete interior gutting of the building. (During this project, business students attended classes in other buildings on campus.)
There were between 70 and 100 people working on this project at any given time.
Shawmut Vice President Anthony Miliote says his firm and Cannon Design, the project’s architect, managed to trim the project’s cost from its original budget of about $24.5 million. “Cannon was very pragmatic,” says Miliote, about making modifications to more reasonably priced materials and mechanical systems.
The $22 million renovation included an expanded lobby area. Image: Shawmut Design and Construction.
In the process, the Building Team updated the space by creating an expanded lobby area, and a high-tech “financial lab,” which Miliote explains is a large classroom/lecture space with computers.
The top two floors are mostly offices for faculty, and the bottom two classrooms. A 503-sf central staircase, with seating steps and ramp, connects the floors. And a horseshoe-shaped atrium provides more transparency throughout the building.
The exterior of the building was pretty much kept intact. The revised front façade involved about 900 sf of curtainwall and storefront glazing, which lets more natural light into the building. The entryway, says Miliote, also got new hard- and landscaping.
A 960-sf outdoor patio with a sloped glass entry was installed where a loading dock roof had once been. And the business school now includes a large multi-purpose space, student study areas, collaboration areas, a career service center, and a start-up incubator lab.
Shawmut is still doing some work for St. John’s, as well as academic projects with NYU Langone, Columbia University and Columbia Medical School, Riverdale Country School, and The Buckley School.
“A lot of this work is about keeping up with the Joneses, enhancing the student experience, and adapting to changing technology,” says Miliote.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Research Facility Breaks the Mold
In the market for state-of-the-art biomedical research space in Boston's Longwood Medical Area? Good news: there are still two floors available in the Center for Life Science | Boston, a multi-tenant, speculative high-rise research building designed by Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Boston, and developed by Lyme Properties, Hanover, N.
| Aug 11, 2010
Precast All the Way
For years, precast concrete has been viewed as a mass-produced product with no personality or visual appeal—the vanilla of building materials. Thanks to recent technological innovations in precast molds and thin veneers, however, that image is changing. As precast—concrete building components that are poured and molded offsite—continues to develop a vibrant personality all it...
| Aug 11, 2010
Living and Learning Center, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences
From its humble beginnings as a tiny pharmaceutical college founded by 14 Boston pharmacists, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences has grown to become the largest school of its kind in the U.S. For more than 175 years, MCPHS operated solely in Boston, on a quaint, 2,500-student campus in the heart of the city's famed Longwood Medical and Academic Area.
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 University Report
University construction spending is 13% higher than a year ago—mostly for residence halls and infrastructure on public campuses—and is expected to slip less than 5% over the next two years. However, the value of starts dropped about 10% in recent months and will not return to the 2007–08 peak for about two years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Bowing to Tradition
As the home to Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals—the oldest theatrical company in the nation—12 Holyoke Street had its share of opening nights. In April 2002, however, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences decided the 1888 Georgian Revival building no longer met the needs of the company and hired Boston-based architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates to design a more contemporary facility.
| Aug 11, 2010
Team Tames Impossible Site
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the nation's oldest technology university, has long prided itself on its state-of-the-art design and engineering curriculum. Several years ago, to call attention to its equally estimable media and performing arts programs, RPI commissioned British architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw to design the Curtis R.
| Aug 11, 2010
Setting the Green Standard For Community Colleges
“Ohlone College Newark Campus Is the Greenest College in the World!” That bold statement was the official tagline of the festivities surrounding the August 2008 grand opening of Ohlone College's LEED Platinum Newark (Calif.) Center for Health Sciences and Technology. The 130,000-sf, $58 million community college facility stacks up against some of the greenest college buildings in th...
| Aug 11, 2010
University of Arizona College of Medicine
The hope was that a complete restoration and modernization would bring life back to three neoclassic beauties that formerly served as Phoenix Union High School—but time had not treated them kindly. Built in 1911, one year before Arizona became the country's 48th state, the historic high school buildings endured nearly a century of wear and tear and suffered major water damage and years of...
| Aug 11, 2010
Putting the Metal to the Petal
The Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine was founded in 1985, but the organization didn't have a permanent home until May 2008. That's when the Michael Klahr Center, which houses the HHRC, opened on the Augusta campus of the University of Maine. The design, by Boston-based architects Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, was selected from among more than 200 entries in a university-s...
| Aug 11, 2010
Bronze Award: Alumni Gymnasium Renovation, Dartmouth College Hanover, N.H.
At a time when institutions of higher learning are spending tens of millions of dollars erecting massive, cutting-edge recreation and fitness centers, Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., decided to take a more modest, historical approach. Instead of building an ultra-grand new facility, the university chose to breathe new life into its landmark Alumni Gymnasium by transforming the outdated 99-y...
