Slideshow

Frank Gehry’s proposals for a new business faculty at the University of Technology, Sydney, have provoked a storm of media interest, with the building being billed as everything from a rival to the opera house to an insult to the city. The scheme is characteristic of the architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim: folding, swirling and crumpling facades wrapped around an extraordinary, complex interior city.

Frank Gehry’s proposals for a new business faculty at the University of Technology, Sydney, have provoked a storm of media interest, with the building being billed as everything from a rival to the opera house to an insult to the city. The scheme is characteristic of the architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim: folding, swirling and crumpling facades wrapped around an extraordinary, complex interior city.

The Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, designed by David Adjaye, the British architect, established a new model for business schools. Inspired at least in part by the radical, visionary architecture of Russian constructivism, it blends architectural motifs from ideological communism and global corporate capitalism in the most striking manner.

The Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, designed by David Adjaye, the British architect, established a new model for business schools. Inspired at least in part by the radical, visionary architecture of Russian constructivism, it blends architectural motifs from ideological communism and global corporate capitalism in the most striking manner.

The dynamic prow of the Chapman Graduate School of Business in Miami picks up on the local MiMo (Miami modernism) style, a kind of exotic, palm-lined, sunny architecture that suits the more laid-back, Latin-influenced campus. Designed by KPF, the international architectural practice, the school is as much about the landscape as the building, and as much about exterior as interior.

MIT Sloan School of Management by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners is a cocktail of corporate glass modernism and the solid stone classicism of New England, a fine metaphor for a serious school that patently does not want to create architectural fireworks.

The copper-clad ziggurat that announces Oxford’s Saïd Business School (designed by Dixon Jones, the UK architectural practice) has become one of few recent additions to the city’s skyline of spires. The building itself, set around a calm courtyard, echoes the traditional colleges.

KPF’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is a big building of real clarity. Expressed in a bold, contemporary modernism, it is as efficient, bright and clear as the business practices it aims to expound.

Ian Simpson Architects’ slender tower for Newcastle University Business School represents an effort to anchor an emerging business district opposite St James’s Park, the city’s football ground. This is architectural boosterism, building in a corporate idiom as an attempt to show that big business has arrived.

Foster + Partners’ Yale School of Management is a perfect meshing of the architects’ oeuvre and the school’s ethos. Lord Foster’s clean, hyper-modern crispness is the perfect expression of the modern business school. Wholly glazed walls, impossibly attenuated columns and generous spaces make an ethereal, almost weightless interior.

Established in 1693, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, is the second-oldest university in the US (after Harvard). Robert A.M. Stern Architects’ new building, the Alan B. Miller Hall, is a serious slab of classicism for the Mason School of Business, and its generous civic brick building is intended to establish the school in the colonial-era architectural context, using motifs from the William & Mary era. It looks like it has always been there.