Inside Marquette's new business school: Pitch pit, patio, stock ticker, recording studio

Marquette's beloved beer can is gone. In its place is O'Brien Hall, a gleaming four-story facility for the university's business students.

The College of Business Administration hopes its new location at the site of the former McCormick Hall, a cylindrical-shaped residence hall located at one of the most prominent spots on campus, will bring more visibility and interaction with Milwaukee's business community.

"We think this is certainly going to be game-changing for our college and our university," said acting business college dean Tim Hanley. "We view this as a convening place for business and alumni, and we're very excited about the strategic nature of the location."

The college's new home on the the northeast corner of 16th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue also shakes up the campus' clear sense of separation between the academic side of Marquette on the south side of Wisconsin Avenue and the residential aspects of campus clustered on the north side of the street.

University architect Lora Strigens said she doesn't see any immediate plans to bring more major academic buildings to the north side of campus that has long been dominated by dorms and dining facilities. But she also didn't rule out the possibility. Marquette's campus master plan was last approved in 2016 and university leaders are just starting to think about the next set of major building projects to tackle.

The 100,000-square-foot O'Brien Hall project broke ground in early 2021. Construction on the $60 million, fully donor-funded building wrapped up this fall. Classes opened for the college's roughly 1,500 undergraduates and 375 graduate students on Tuesday.

Even before the building opened to campus this spring semester, Marquette already reaped benefits from the project, Hanley said. This year's incoming class of business majors was about 40% larger than in past years. The college's highly ranked programs are the main draw, he said, but the fact that freshmen will spend most of their university career in the brand new building also helps.

O'Brien Hall's building includes café, patio, 'pitch pit'

One of O'Brien Hall's most striking features will be a massive first-floor event space that can easily transition from classrooms to a 200-seat dinner space.

The design is in line with the building's overall goal of creating flexible spaces that can serve multiple functions. Just outside the event space, for example, is a seating area where the seats can be adjusted to different heights so the college can "switch from study time to cocktail time," said Marquette project manager Kathy Kugi-Tom.

Kent Belasco, who leads the college's commercial banking program, said he appreciates how classrooms have multiple display screens on different walls so students can follow along no matter where they're seated.

Other building highlights includes a recording studio and a presentation room modeled after a modern-day corporate board room. Budding entrepreneurs can sell their ideas to venture capitalists, Shark Tank style, in the "pitch pit." The Baird Lab, complete with a live stock ticker and Bloomberg terminals, will house the college's Applied Investment Management program.

There's also a first-floor café that opens to an outdoor patio, trellis and two fire pits. Students can scan their ID card to get a fire going.

The dean's office includes sweeping views of Marquette's skyline and is named after Joe Daniels, the former business college dean who died in a hit-and-run on campus in 2020.

A nod to McCormick Hall

Hints of the former McCormick Hall are sprinkled throughout the building.

Green tiles in the café are reminiscent of the ones in McCormick's dining hall. A wooden cafe counter is made from trees that grew on site.

Will the new building get a nickname as cool as the one McCormick had?

Kugi-Tom hadn't heard any thrown around yet. But she suspects students will land on something by the end of the spring semester.

What's next for Marquette's building plans?

O'Brien Hall is about 25% bigger than the business college's former home, David A. Straz Jr. Hall, which was built in the early 1950s.

"Everything is more welcoming," said Jaiden Schueller, a senior studying corporate communications who has an accounting class in O'Brien Hall this semester and plans to pop by the Starbucks-like café often. "It makes me more motivated. Straz was so dark and outdated."

Straz has "held up well" over the past 70 years, Hanley said, but it wasn't designed for today's business school students. There are few common spaces for students to work together on projects, and some important offices, like the career services center, are tucked away in areas that get little traffic.

Marquette plans to "tear down a good portion" of Straz and add onto it, too, Hanley said. The new building will eventually become the new home for the College of Nursing in 2024 and allow the university to graduate 100 more nurses each year.

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Contact Kelly Meyerhofer at kmeyerhofer@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KellyMeyerhofer.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Marquette University unveils new College of Business building