IU business school expansion nearing completion

The doors where undergraduates once entered the Kelley School of Business are gone.

In their place is now where hallways meet and open to a three-level common area. It's one aspect of the $32.5 million expansion project that adds space for the growing needs of the business school, but keeps to the aesthetic of the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. And it's nearly complete.

"It's all finishing touches," Teresa Kase, Kelley's assistant dean for finance and operations, told The Herald-Times.

The expansion will be complete at the beginning of August, she said. Fee Lane, which was one-way traffic since the expansion construction started, reopened to two-way traffic last week. The only major thing remaining is the landscaping, Kase said.

Started in May 2012, the 90,000-square-foot expansion on four stories adds classrooms, meeting spaces and career training offices to the undergraduate business building in an L-shape along 10th Street and Fee Lane, moving the main entrance to face Fee.

Renovations of the existing building, built in the mid-1960s, are just beginning. Work started this May and will be done in phases until fall of 2016, Kase said. The total cost of the renovation and expansion is $60 million, and although costs are covered, Kase said there are still donor-naming opportunities throughout the building.

The increase in space — more than 1,000 seats among 16 classrooms — will allow for at least 100 more students per academic year, bumping the undergraduate program up to about 5,000 students, plus the students who have business minors, Kase said.

The expansion has a fourth-floor outdoor patio and a Kelley apparel store on the main floor as well as a stock trading room and a sales laboratory where students can make sales pitches and be recorded for critiques, Kase said.

She said students can reserve classrooms not in use to study together, and there are now various open spaces along the hallway to work.

"Students have a gathering space and don't have to sit on the hallway floor," she said. "We had a shortage of space in our old building for students to work on projects."

Student groups and faculty will also be able to use a new multipurpose room and executive meeting room, and there will be a new space for prospective students and their parents to learn about the school, Kase said. She said the wooden floor in that room is from the trees that were cut down for the expansion, and seedlings were also saved from those trees to be transplanted to other areas of campus.

Allen Headley, facilities director for Kelley, said the expansion's wooden details and other design aspects are modeled after Woodburn Hall to fit with the current campus.

"The goal is to make the building look like it's been here for 100 years," he said.