U of MO Builds 'New Generation' B-School

KANSAS CITY—This fall, the University of Missouri-Kansas City will open the $32 million, 58,000-square-foot Henry W. Bloch Executive Hall for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Part of the university's Henry W. Bloch School of Management, the new three-story glass and terracotta building will help 1,800 graduate and undergraduate students learn by doing, officials say, by providing a simulated trading floor, design lab and behavioral science research space.

“The new Bloch Hall is more like a design school than a business school,” said the UMKC Bloch School Dean Teng-kee Tan. “While there will still be traditional classroom and case-method learning, the Bloch School is striving to break traditional molds by inventing and propagating new methods of experiential learning.”

For example, the behavioral lab allows students to conduct on-the-spot experiments to gain insights into consumer behavior. And a new finance lab, which includes the trading floor, will allow the simulation of real-time market transactions.

“We sought to shape the future of B-school design by creating spaces for highly active experiences,” says Steve McDowell, principal of BNIM, the Kansas City-based designer of the new building. “Outside represents a perfect square, but the inside has curvature and flow that allow people in the building to have clear views of other people, floors and spaces.”

The California architectural firm Moore Ruble Yudell also helped design the new school, which was built by JE Dunn Construction. The partners designed it to meet LEED Gold certification standards by providing amenities such as with three giant skylights which provide natural light throughout the day.