A New Heart of Campus

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

  • Agricultural Sciences Complex

    Agricultural Sciences Complex

    Established in 1999, the Education Design Showcase is a vehicle for showing off innovative — yet practical — solutions in planning, design, architecture, and construction. The College of Western Idaho's Agricultural Sciences Complex has been recognized with an EDS 2026 Grand Prize award in the category of New Construction.

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • school building with glowing circuit board patterns

    AI Is Coming to Schools — But Most School Buildings Still Run on Institutional Memory

    As school districts race to introduce AI into classrooms, administration, and curriculum planning, another conversation is happening behind the scenes: How prepared are school facilities themselves for the operational demands AI will create?

  • R.I. District Holds Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony for New Elementary School

    Cranston Public Schools in Cranston, R.I., recently announced the completion of Gladstone Elementary School, according to a news release. The 100,000-square-foot facility serves as a replacement for the 1950s-era former building, and it consolidates the student, faculty, and staff populations of Gladstone and Arlington Elementary Schools.