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
Perkins Eastman awarded Indian School of Business campus
The New York office of Perkins Eastman has been commissioned by the Indian School of Business for a 70-acre, 1.5 million-sf new business school campus as part of a 300-acre “Knowledge City” in Chandigarh, Mohali, India. The sustainable campus will accommodate four centers of excellence: healthcare management, public policy, manufacturing/operations, and physical infrastructure manag...
| Aug 11, 2010
Opening night close for Kent State performing arts center
The curtain opens on the Tuscarawas Performing Arts Center at Kent State University in early 2010, giving the New Philadelphia, Ohio, school a 1,100-seat multipurpose theater. The team of Legat & Kingscott of Columbus, Ohio, and Schorr Architects of Dublin, Ohio, designed the 50,000-sf facility with a curving metal and glass façade to create a sense of movement and activity.
| Aug 11, 2010
Residence hall designed specifically for freshman
Hardin Construction Company's Austin, Texas, office is serving as GC for the $50 million freshman housing complex at the University of Houston. Designed by HADP Architecture, Austin, the seven-story, 300,000-sf facility will be located on the university's central campus and have 1,172 beds, residential advisor offices, a social lounge, a computer lab, multipurpose rooms, a fitness center, and a...
| Aug 11, 2010
University of Florida's traditionally modern graduate building
The University of Florida's Hough Hall Graduate Studies Building was designed by Rowe Architects, Tampa, and Sasaki Associates, Boston, to blend with the school's traditional collegiate gothic architecture outside, but reflect a 21st-century education facility inside. Tallahassee-based Ajax Building Corporation is constructing the $19 million facility, which will have traditional exterior detai...
| Aug 11, 2010
Construction under way on LEED Platinum DOE energy lab
Centennial, Colo.-based Haselden Construction has topped out the $64 million Research Support Facilities, located on the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) campus in Golden, Colo. Designed by RNL and Stantec to achieve LEED Platinum certification and net zero energy performance, the 218,000-sf facility will feature natural ventilation through operable ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Stimulus funding helps get NOAA project off the ground
The award-winning design for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new Southwest Fisheries Science Center replacement laboratory saw its first sign of movement last month with a groundbreaking ceremony held in La Jolla, Calif. The $102 million project is funded primarily by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
| Aug 11, 2010
New Jersey's high-tech landscaping facility
Designed to enhance the use of science and technology in Bergen County Special Services' landscaping programs, the new single-story facility at the technical school's Paramus campus will have 7,950 sf of classroom space, a 1,000-sf greenhouse (able to replicate different environments, such as rainforest, desert, forest, and tundra), and 5,000 sf of outside landscaping and gardening space.
| Aug 11, 2010
Florida International University's cantilevered design
Suffolk Construction's Miami-Dade business unit is serving as GC for the $14 million School of International and Public Affairs building at the University Park Campus of Florida International University. Designed by Arquitectonica, Miami, the five-story, 58,408-sf building will have a café and three auditoriums on the ground level; the largest auditorium will have a 40-foot cantilever abov...
| Aug 11, 2010
Concrete Solutions
About five or six years ago, officials at the University of California at Berkeley came to the conclusion that they needed to build a proper home for the university's collection of 900,000 rare Chinese, Japanese, and Korean books and materials. East Asian studies is an important curriculum at Berkeley, with more than 70 scholars teaching some 200 courses devoted to the topic, and Berkeley's pro...
| 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.
