Marquette $60M Business School on Track to Open Dec. 2022

Milwaukee's Marquette University is on track to complete construction of a new, $60-million business school in a year. According to the institution, the facility is the largest donor-funded one in its history.

The 100,000-square-foot structure is designed to include collaborative classroom, lab and study spaces; an event space; faculty offices; and areas for programmatic centers of excellence. The first floor will provide wrap-around student support with advising, a student success center and a business career center.

The new space will also include a café, where "collisions between our students, our faculty and our stakeholders will happen," according to Tim Hanley, interim dean of the College of Business Administration.

Marquette University Business School

As people walk into the building, they'll enter a "light-filled atrium" that leads to a planned Applied Investment Management Lab, "where we think the action's going to happen," said Hanley. "I think this facility will be a gamechanger for the university across all of our landscape."

The new facility will also house innovation leadership programs, including Excellence in Leadership (E-LEAD) and interdisciplinary Bridge to Business for Engineers. Campus officials noted that Its closeness to the university's College of Engineering "will help foster creative collisions of thought and perspective that fuel an innovative mindset."

The four-story building design is being led by Vice President for Planning and Facilities Management, Lora Strigens, and her team, in partnership with architectural firms BNIM of Kansas City and Milwaukee-based Workshop Architects. Findorff is constructing the building

The building is scheduled to open in December 2022.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Spaces4Learning Launches 2026 Facilities and Construction Brief Survey

    Spaces4Learning recently launched the 2026 Facilities and Construction Brief Survey, which collects data on the previous year’s K–12 and higher education construction projects nationwide.

  • Q&A: How to Prevent Kitchen Grease Fires in Commercial Kitchens

    School cafeterias and university dining halls serve thousands of meals daily, relying on high-heat equipment like fryers, grills, and ovens. While these operations keep students fed, they also generate significant grease-laden vapors. Without proper controls, this grease becomes a silent fire threat. As a certified exhaust cleaning specialist and business coach who has helped hundreds of institutional facilities achieve NFPA 96 compliance, I emphasize that proactive grease management isn’t optional; it’s a core fire/life safety practice.

  • Dallas ISD Voters Approve $6.2B Bond Package

    Dallas ISD voters have approved a record-setting $6.2-billion bond package that district leaders say will modernize aging campuses, eliminate portable classrooms and reshape learning environments across one of the nation’s largest school systems.

  • Opportunity by Design Framework

    Opportunity by Design

    Educational improvement efforts often focus on curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development, and intervention systems while treating the physical school building as background. But school design is not a passive backdrop to learning — it is a structural lever for equity.