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Major Gift to Columbia Will Help Jumpstart Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Business School Plans

Major Gift to Columbia Will Help Jumpstart Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Business School Plans

In May, Ronald O. Perelman, Chairman and CEO of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings and a member of the School’s Board of Overseers, pledged a milestone donation of $100 million to Columbia Business School, which could help jumpstart the construction of two new facilities to be built on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the structures will incorporate zig-zag cutaway facades akin to the design seen in Columbia’s Washington Heights medial center plans, also by the firm.

The business school buildings will provide a total of 450,000 square feet of space, some of which will be allotted to the increasingly popular collaborative gathering spaces that university campuses have come to know well. The new buildings are designed to accommodate the fast-paced, technologically advanced, and vastly communal character of 21st-century business and business education with multifunctional areas meant to cultivate a sense of community for students, faculty, and alumni.

Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard has disclosed that the donation will permit the School to reach a new chapter in its extension into Manhattanville, located immediately north of the University’s current Morningside Campus. The planned Manhattanville campus is a $6.3 billion project with projected completion set for sometime within the next couple decades. Perelman’s donation marks the $455 million mark of a $600 million funding goal. In appreciation of Perelman’s generosity, one of the two future buildings expected to open within the next decade will be named the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation. Columbia will name the other of the two new facilities The Henry R. Kravis Building in honor of Henry Kravis’s 2010 gift.


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