Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

A New Heart of Campus

  • 01/01/18
College of Business Building at UNL

PHOTO COURTESY OF APMA

The new College of Business Building at UNL achieves a sense of openness thanks to a Wausau curtainwall.

The newly opened University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) College of Business building quickly is becoming known as the “heart of the UNL campus,” thanks to its prominent location and distinctive design featuring curtainwall from Wausau Window and Wall Systems. Demonstrating the importance of this project, alumni and private donations funded the $84 million construction project.

According to the project’s lead architect, New York-based Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), Wausau’s curtainwall was used to “provide a sense of both openness and permanence” for the new College of Business building. Alley Poyner Macchietto Architecture (APMA) served as the project’s associate architect.

The new five-story, 240,000-square-foot building sits at the east end of the campus’s iconic Memorial Mall.

Wausau’s engineering team previously worked with RAMSA on such notable projects as The Clarendon Boston residential tower, Penn State University’s Smeal College of Business and Virginia’s Richmond Federal Courthouse. “Thanks to a good relationship and solid history of successful projects with RAMSA and APMA, we were involved early in the project,” says Doug Laffin, Wausau’s architectural sales representative.

“We were able to propose an engineered solution to match their design goals, as well as to provide input on realistic budget pricing and meeting the aggressive schedule.” Wausau’s INvision unitized curtainwall systems were established as the basis of design. General contractor Hausmann Construction selected City Glass Co. and Glass Edge as the glazing contractors. Together, they installed more than 60,000 square feet of Wausau’s curtainwall.

With respect to longevity, the new College of Business replaces the former 98-year-old college, which had become too small to hold the more than 5,200 business students, faculty, and staff who use the building each academic year.

www.wausauwindow.com

This article originally appeared in the College Planning & Management January 2018 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Arlington High School

    Arlington High School

    Established in 1999, the Education Design Showcase is a vehicle for showing off innovative — yet practical — solutions in planning, design, architecture, and construction. Arlington High School has been recognized with an EDS 2026 Grand Prize award in the category of New Construction.

  • Texas Recruitment

    Texas Recruitment

    Established in 1999, the Education Design Showcase is a vehicle for showing off innovative — yet practical — solutions in planning, design, architecture, and construction. The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Recruitment has been recognized with an EDS 2026 Grand Prize award in the category of Renovation.

  • Higher Ed is Betting on New Buildings While Quietly Undermining Their Campuses — Here’s Why

    In this climate, the owner’s representative has changed from a delivery-focused advisor to a strategic campus partner. Institutions are increasingly relying on owner’s reps not just to manage, cope, schedule, and budget, but also help evaluate whether a project should proceed at all.

  • Designing for Every Mind

    Learning environments have the power to shape not just what students know, but who they become. When a school is designed with genuine empathy—for the full range of ways students think, sense, and engage with the world—it becomes more than a building. It becomes a catalyst for growth, confidence, and belonging. That is the animating idea behind neurodiverse design, and it is one that is transforming how more architects and designers are thinking about school design.