2013
Project Partners
Description
Gerri C. LeBow Hall, the 12-story, 177,500-square-foot home for LeBow College of Business, is located at the heart of Drexel University's campus, at the intersection of Woodland Walk and Market Street, where it provides a backdrop to the historic statue of A. J. Drexel (Moses Ezekiel, 1904). The diagonal massing of the lower floors follows Woodland Walk and combines with the Papadakis Integrated Science Building (Diamond & Schmitt, 2011) to energize the University's central quadrangle. The building's tower marks the LeBow College and Drexel campus from all directions, while the open, glassy Market Street facade showcases the College's student activities to passersby.
LeBow Hall features undergraduate and graduate classrooms organized around a dramatic central atrium that is accessible from entrances at the building's three corners. An open stair within this atrium leads down to a 300-seat auditorium and a 100-seat lecture hall, and up to a conference center. On the building’s upper floors, faculty offices are interspersed among seminar rooms and group study rooms—a deliberate mix of uses to foster the collegial interaction between students and faculty that is essential to business education. The building houses LeBow College's five centers – the Center for Corporate Governance, the Dana and David Dornsife Office for Experiential Learning, the Center for Corporate Reputation Management, the Center for Research Excellence, and the Center for Teaching Excellence, as well as the Institute of Strategic Leadership and the Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship. The Baiada Institute occupies the third floor of the facility, focusing on entrepreneurship in action, offering mentoring programs, business incubation, student clubs, and unique opportunities that advance entrepreneurs.
LeBow Hall's warm masonry and glass exterior reflects the emerging vocabulary of the next generation of Drexel buildings. Sophisticated solar shading devices allow maximum transparency while supporting the building's high environmental aspirations. LeBow Hall also features a green roof and is Green Globe certified.