UMass Lowell on Friday broke ground on a new $40 million home for the university’s Manning School of Business on its North Campus.
The 52,000-square-foot Pulichino Tong Business Building, named for husband-and-wife pair and school alumni John Pulichino and Joy Tong, will be located at the corner of University Avenue and Riverside Street. It will sit adjacent to UMass Lowell’s Mark and Elisia Saab Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center, as well as Alumni Hall and the Lydon Library. The area, combined with the academic and laboratory complex across University Avenue, will become known as the North Campus Innovation District.
The centerpiece will be a four-story atrium overlooking an outdoor plaza formed by the new and existing buildings, creating more green space on North Campus. Renovations to Lydon Library will connect it to the business school building.
Other features will include a finance laboratory designed to simulate on-the-job experiences in the business world, such as a trading room with access to real-time stock market information, and technology-enhanced classrooms and seminar rooms that can accommodate more than 400 students.
"The state-of-the-art Pulichino Tong Business Building will offer a vital new center for business education on our campus and enhance the high-quality education our faculty provides students to prepare them for success in the ever-changing global economy," Kathryn Carter, dean of UMass Lowell’s Manning School of Business, said in a statement. "This new home will also present opportunities for research and collaboration with industry and entrepreneurs."
The Pulichino Tong Business Building is scheduled to open in 2017 and will serve the university’s undergraduate and graduate students studying accounting, entrepreneurship, finance, international business, management and operations and information systems.
The building was designed by Cambridge Seven Assoc. of Cambridge and will incorporate high-performance, sustainable and energy-efficient features that will meet or exceed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver-Plus standards.
