Paccar Hall means business at UW

It was called Balmer Hall, but students in the University of Washington's Foster School of Business had a playful nickname for it: Bummer High.

The locker-lined hallways, dreary fluorescent lighting and same-size classrooms made business school seem like high school. For these soon-to-be captains of industry and commerce, it was a bummer of a building.

But that changed when gleaming Paccar Hall opened on campus in September, and students and faculty have been reveling in their new digs. The $95 million building was financed through private donations and was designed by one of the city's leading architectural firms.

UW officials hope the new building will help elevate the school, attracting top student and faculty talent and helping it climb higher in national and international rankings and reputation. Founded in 1917, it is the second-oldest business school on the West Coast.

"Frankly, this building is quite inspiring," said Jim Jiambalvo, dean of the school. "It's a wonderful space."

The fact that Paccar Hall opened during one of the worst round of budget cuts the state has ever seen is a testament to how long it can take to raise money privately, Jiambalvo said.

"We have ties to people who have been very successful," he said. "This is our first new building since 1962. If someone thinks this [raising private money] is easy — this is not easy."

The gift-giving also underscores the importance the area's companies have placed on the need to have a top business school here.

The school was named Paccar in recognition of a gift of $16 million from the Bellevue truck manufacturer. The gift made Paccar one of the top five corporate lifetime donors to the University of Washington.

Other top contributors to the building included professional-services firm Deloitte, Bellevue-based cellphone provider T-Mobile USA and Seattle-based Alaska Airlines.

The Foster School emphasizes leadership, strategic thinking and teamwork. Students have to be able to take "messy, unstructured, real-world problems" and figure out how to solve them, Jiambalvo said.

A lively place

Before the building opened, "it was constantly a struggle to find meeting rooms" on campus for team meetings, said student Cassandra Hamilton, a senior majoring in human resources. Paccar has 28 "breakout rooms" specifically designed for student teams to hash through real-life business problems, with whiteboards that cover one wall of each room.

The 132,000-square-foot, brick-and-glass building is designed around a central atrium. Classrooms come in a variety of sizes and designs, including 14 U-shaped tiered spaces and a 250-seat auditorium. The building has informal seating areas and places to meet throughout.

Paccar is busy day and night, a marked contrast to Balmer.

"There's life all the time, which is really exciting," said Matt Eliseo, a second-year MBA student. The building "is remarkably more comfortable, and it's remarkably easier to focus on what you're doing," he said.

The U-shaped classrooms allow professors and students to face each other, as in a theater-in-the-round. "You can have a much more lively, case-based instruction," Jiambalvo said.

Thomas Gilbert, an assistant professor of finance, lectured one day last month about the capital-asset pricing model and whether it could be used to evaluate individual stocks.

Smartly dressed in a charcoal-gray pinstriped suit, Gilbert, a slender man with a commanding voice, made use of the room's document camera and the projector that showed notes and graphics from his laptop on two soaring screens at the front of the room.

He had given the students homework to evaluate a handful of stocks using an investment model, and then, over the next 20 minutes, led them to understand what was wrong with using this model to evaluate stocks.

"This model is crap!" said Gilbert, who has a flair for the theatrical. "People are rational? That's crazy. No transaction costs? Give me a break. All the assumptions are flawed." The students laughed.

During a class break, Gilbert said the U-shaped classrooms are wonderful for teaching. The acoustics are well-designed, and the technology helps illustrate his points.

"I can use this space to tell my story," he said.

Sense of community

The building was designed by LMN Architects, a Seattle firm that also designed Benaroya and McCaw halls and was the local architectural partner for Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas on the downtown Seattle Public Library.

The school was "interested in finding ways to create a really powerful community experience in the building," LMN design partner Mark Reddington said. "Connecting with other people was at the heart of what they wanted to accomplish."

Reddington said the five-story building was designed with many in-between spaces that connect horizontally and vertically, and has a strong tie to the outdoors, with an extensive use of glass and a terrace on the fourth floor.

A ground-floor cafe called Orin's Place — after Orin Smith, a former president and CEO of Starbucks and now a member of the UW Board of Regents — and an adjoining lounge with a fireplace have become a magnet for students across campus.

Paccar Hall is the first — and largest — part of a two-phase project for the business school. A second building, which will cost $46 million, is being built next door to hold administrative offices and some classrooms. It will be constructed with money from the student-funded building fund, and is expected to open in spring 2012.

"We have a mission — we want to be the best business school in the country," said Camilo Moreno-Salamanca, a junior majoring in marketing and entrepreneurship. "A professional environment goes a long way to accomplishing that mission."

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com