College of Business | University of South Florida -- St. Petersburg, Florida

68,000 SF | business commons | scholars’ garden | group study rooms | tiered classrooms | trading room | community room | 220-seat auditorium | behavioral lab | café | offices

Located at a prominent intersection where Downtown St. Petersburg meets the University of South Florida, Pippenger Hall for the Tiedemann College of Business engages the City by presenting itself as a monumental glass arch, intended to serve as both a symbolic and physical gateway to the University of South Florida’s original “Bay Campus” and Bayboro Harbor beyond. The four-story, 68,000-square-foot structure takes inspiration from its Tampa Bay setting and the indigenous coral stone, and is rendered as a porous vessel with openings carved out of its volume, housing various program elements and allowing sunlight and landscaping to penetrate deep within the structure’s core, with a glass façade that metaphorically recalls the openings in regional organic coquina. A large entry porch on Fourth Street South, flanked on either side by graduate program and career services offices, leads to a light-filled multistory central commons designed to support casual learning and encourage collegial interactions between students and faculty as they move through the building. Case-study classrooms, breakout rooms, and a 220-seat auditorium line the commons on the first floor, and a variety of classrooms—tiered classrooms, seminar rooms, flat flexible classrooms, and a trading room and computer lab—overlook the commons, as does an outdoor Scholars’ Garden with a social stair that leads to the building’s third floor. The top two floors provide faculty and administrative offices, as well as a Wealth Management Center, Consumer Insight Lab, and behavioral, online media, and entrepreneurial programs suites. The new building opens to an east-facing Palm tree-lined courtyard for relaxed gathering and outdoor study that connects to an existing allée of mature Banyan trees leading to the campus’s beloved Harborwalk, establishing a physical connection from Downtown St. Petersburg, through the USF-SP campus, to the water. This project was a joint venture with Harvard Jolly Architects.