Baker Library | Bloomberg Center

Baker Library was designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1927 as the centerpiece of the Harvard Business School campus. Our renovation and addition reconceived the building as a 160,000-gross-square-foot center for research and group study, with greatly expanded meeting facilities, offices for faculty and their support staff, and archival storage for the Library's one-of-a-kind collection of historical business materials.

The historic north facade was fully restored with replacement double-hung Georgian windows that meet twenty-first-century energy performance goals and satisfy ultraviolet protection requirements—especially important to the library's restored historic reading room. Important interior rooms of the original building were restored; we rectified earlier renovations by creating new rooms in the existing building; and the original self-supporting stacks were replaced with new construction to accommodate offices, seminar rooms, and lounges. Faculty office configurations were standardized and organized to integrate shared spaces for collaboration. A skylit atrium brings natural light deep into the building and provides an informal meeting place for students and faculty.

Central to the reorganization is a second front entrance at what was originally the back of the building to address the reorientation of the campus to the south, making the building an easily accessible crossroads of the HBS campus. Our design provides for pedestrian movement through the building from north to south through the original portico and lobby, and secondary circulation from west to east, all on the first floor.

The Baker Library | Bloomberg Center is our second project at the Harvard Business School, following on the completion of the Spangler Campus Center in early 2001.