A new vision for the Sprott School of Business

As part of an innovative project, students from the business and architecture programs at Carleton envisioned what a new Sprott building could look like and presented their designs to the community last week.

The course placed third and fourth-year business students and Master of Architecture students into 16 groups to design a new building for the business school, located either on-campus or on Albert Island near downtown Ottawa.

The new buildings were designed to be full-service, incorporating classrooms and offices as well as event and study space. The on-campus projects also featured space for a school-run hotel.

After completing their designs, students presented their proposals to a diverse panel of judges, including local architects, developers and Sprott dean Jerry Tomberlin. The projects were displayed in the University Centre galleria for three days and visitors voted more than 300 times for their favourite proposal.

To view the students’ designs, check out the project websites.

The course was created by Sprott professor Troy Anderson in collaboration with architecture professors Claudio Sgarbi and Maria Denegri.

Nilakshi Roy is a Masters of Architecture student who developed the campus-based “Pivot” project and she said the chance to work with another architecture student as well as a business student was unique in her academic career.

Pictured is one of the models from the gallery. The model is all white and the main building is shaped like a staircase.

“I didn’t have many group work opportunities like this during my undergrad in architecture, so it was really great to work not only with another architecture student, but also a business student acting as a client,” she said. “I think this exposure to working collaboratively is really great for us as students and for the school.”

The architecture students were responsible for designing the buildings and producing the models, while the business students focused on defining user needs, developing a proposal to fund the building and designing websites to showcase the projects.

Jon Lewis is a fourth-year Bachelor of Commerce student concentrating in marketing and management and he worked on “Echofront,” one of the projects based on Albert Island. He agreed that the group work in this course challenged students in a new way.

Pictured are renderings of the building projects, displayed on wooden scaffolding. The renderings show the building in various stages of development, as well as bisecting some of the building framework.

“In class, professors always like to stress: ‘You’re going to be working with many different types of people,’ but in our normal courses doing group projects, we’re always working with other business students,” he said. “So this was great to work with student who are not only from a completely different faculty, but they’re also masters students as well, so you get that completely different level of experience.”

Jon said one of the reasons he chose to take this courses is because of his experience in some of Professor Anderson’s other classes, and he also said he hopes more classes like this will be available for future students.

“I think it’s really great that there are sort of ‘test’ courses like this starting to pop up that really push the boundaries of what a normal business school does,” he said.