The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) last week celebrated the official opening of its new home, the Knight Management Center, which it hopes will serve as a launch pad for new courses, programs and cutting-edge research. The $345 million facility is named for Nike founder Philip H. Knight, MBA ’62, who gave the $105 million down payment.
The culmination of 10 years of planning and three years of construction, the Knight Center consists of eight environmentally sustainable buildings on 12.5 acres. The facilities include a collaborative lab space, a 600-person CEMEX auditorium, a 400-person conference center and flexible classroom spaces for hands-on experiential learning, small-group leadership labs and team-based learning. Two Cisco TelePresence systems will allow for remote cross-campus and global classroom communications.
The new center also features a purposefully open building design, including an outdoor, late-night dining pavilion and café, designed to draw students and faculty from Stanford’s schools of engineering, law, medicine, earth sciences, education, and humanities and sciences to the GSB. The conference center, too, will feature university-wide programming to engage non-business students from across campus.
“It’s a virtual world, but it is face-to-face interactions—often that happen in serendipitous fashion—that are still critical to the way much of great innovation takes place,” said Stanford University President John Hennessy in a statement.
Last Friday, the GSB hosted an open house for the general public as well as for Stanford University students, faculty and staff. The event included a debate on leadership by Stanford GSB faculty members Jeff Pfeffer and Joel Peterson, music by the Stanford Band and campus a cappella groups and food from Bon Appetit in the new facility’s dining areas.
For more information on Stanford GSB’s new Knight Management Center, click here.
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