Wharton Holds First Class At New Digs
Submitted January 5, 2012, 3:35 PM
Wharton/San Francisco has opened its Hills Bros. Plaza campus at 2 Harrison St. a year after signing a 10-year lease to occupy 34,700 square feet in the 1920s-era building.
The space features luxury-class improvements designed around the school’s executive MBA program, which requires students, typically full-time working professionals, to visit the campus every other weekend over two years for lectures and related instruction to earn the advanced degree.
Wharton spent the previous decade in 24,000 square feet at San Francisco’s 101 Howard St., which is a stone’s throw from the new location. Bernadette Birt, chief operating officer and executive of the Wharton MBA for Executives program in San Francisco, said the larger location meant the university will be able to increase enrollment, though she did not say how much. The new space also accommodates more meeting rooms, especially those for small groups, and an eating and gathering area with 2,500 square feet large enough to accommodate 160 people.
The school currently has two hundred students in its San Francisco MBA for Executives program and draws not only from the Bay Area and the rest of California but also from across the Western United States including Hawaii, Colorado, Washington and Texas, Birt said.
Faculty from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia fly to San Francisco every other weekend, and the students and faculty essentially spend every waking minute together for the duration, staying at the same hotel and eating together, when they are not in the classroom or working in smaller groups on assignments.
“It is considered a residential program, so even if you live in San Francisco, you are expected to stay at the hotel. It is not a commuter program,” Birt said.
Wharton selected the Harrison Street location because it is able to have all of its classrooms and other operations on a single floor. “They wanted to be able to see this as a campus within the floor of a building in San Francisco,” said Mallory Wall, project manager for BCCI Construction Co., the general contractor who completed Wharton’s tenant improvements. BCCI also did the tenant improvements for Wharton at 101 Howard when it moved to San Francisco a decade ago.
The school also was able to create three lecture rooms with tiered, or stadium-style seating, despite the elaborate engineering challenge. One room is large enough to seat about 160 students, and the other two are each large enough for about half that many.
“We had to remove columns in all three of them [to create clear sight-lines], so we brought in 44-foot beams for structural reinforcement,” Wall said. “That was the kick-start for the project, and it took three or four months to plan. We had to shut down streets and crane in the beams.”
The Howard Street location only accommodated flat classrooms, Birt said.
The Harrison Street space includes 14 group study rooms decked out with extensive sound-proofing and audio-visual equipment for students to collaborate on projects in smaller groups. The space also features a private faculty lounge and offices as well as administrative offices. Gensler was Wharton's designer for the 2 Harrison space.
