Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology’s under-construction new campus in Roxbury’s Nubian Square will include glass-walled ground floor space providing views of educational programs including its robotics lab. Image courtesy of Studio G Architects and Studio Enee

Standing outside a former construction supply company site in Roxbury on Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Charlie Baker took out his cellphone, held it up in front of his face and snapped a picture.

“It might not look like it now, which is why it’s great to get your before pictures, because the after is going to be beautiful,” Aisha Francis, president and CEO of the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, said, prompting Baker to capture his own “before” picture of the site at 1011 Harrison Ave.

The “after” is expected to be a 3-story, 68,000-square-foot campus for BFIT, featuring classrooms, labs, workshops and offices for the two-year college of engineering and industrial technologies. The former Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology had been based on Berkeley Street in the South End for years, but has changed its name and is planning to open its new campus by fall 2024 thanks to a $12.5 million gift from suburban real estate titans Bill and Joyce Cummings, and with the help of the state brownfields program.

“I have always thought that Ben Franklin [Institute] was located in a place that unless you knew it was there, you’d drive right by it,” Baker, who chose BFIT as the venue for his first commencement address as governor, said Tuesday. “It sat there on this little corner, kind of just like Ben Franklin, sort of an inauspicious, amazing building. Really, I mean, Ben Franklin to look at [it] what would you think? But the bottom line is the guy was a genius – and Ben Franklin sat there in this quiet little corner of this quiet little street and inside that building, amazing things were happening for kids who were gathering skills and capabilities that they would be able to use literally for the rest of their lives.”

Baker said BFIT is a “great example of why the brownfields program is so important” and said the grant the school gets from the state “will be a big part of what makes it possible for the math to work” for its new campus near Nubian Square.

“It’s no secret that if you can use a program like that to take care of some of the knotty front-end expenses and work that needs to be done to prep the site, the opportunity for the math on the rest of the site to work is far better,” the governor said. “It has been a program that in many cases has made it possible to reimagine, recreate and reinvent many urban streetscapes and neighborhoods over the course of the past 20 years and I can’t wait to see what this looks like when it’s finished.”