Construction of a new building for the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies is on track to start spring 2026.
The 12-story building will take the spot of the parking lot behind the College of Arts and Science at 250 Bay State Road. The project is part of the Boston University Charles River Campus Institutional Master Plan, which includes the renovation of Warren Towers that began this spring.
The BU CRC Community Task Force met Wednesday to discuss the status of the project. The Task Force consists of City of Boston officials, planning consultants and BU administrators.
Cecilia Nardi, director of community relations at the BU Office of Government and Community Affairs, has worked as one of the leads on this project on behalf of BU.
“We are now focusing our planning efforts on the new building for the Pardee School of Global Studies, aligning the University’s commitment to academic engagement and providing state of the art facilities for interdisciplinary studies,” Nardi said.
Sean Gallagher, an architect from Diller Scofidio + Renfro working on the project, shared the design plan for the building during the Task Force meeting.
Gallagher said the architects plan to maintain open space around the building, since the region of campus generates a lot of student traffic. The design team expects to add approximately one acre of green space as well to add more connectivity to the campus.
“We sort of picked up on those paths of travel and started to connect those places so that the public could not walk between cars any longer, but actually walk through the landscape,” Gallagher said.
Pardee Dean Scott Taylor said he looks forward to when Pardee is no longer spread out across multiple buildings on Bay State Road.
“It’s a bit hard, both as a governance challenge and an administrative challenge but also as a community building challenge, to be so spread out, up and down Bay State Road,” Taylor said. “It’s difficult on any number of levels to have a school that is like an archipelago.”
During the initial planning phase, Taylor and other Pardee faculty weighed in on specifications to the building that would align best with the academic environment they are trying to uphold.
Pardee senior Camila Kelly said she has had a few international relations courses along Bay State Road, while most of her classes have been held in CAS. She said she likes the idea of centralizing all Pardee classes.
“Right now, Pardee is sort of a sub-school of CAS,” Kelly said. “Creating a different building would definitely make it feel more official.”
Afiq Amjad Bin Khairir, a BU senior studying computer science, said he is skeptical of another new addition to the campus despite the commitment to creating a new hub for each BU school.
The Center for Computing and Data Sciences is the most recent large development on campus, having started construction in spring 2020 and opened in December of 2022.
“[CDS] kind of sticks out in a way like a sore thumb,” Bin Khairir said. “There’s a lot of better ways to use our money that we pay towards BU.”
Pardee sophomore Tommy Cole said the new building plan looks like a welcome addition to create “one physical hub” for Pardee students.
“The pictures look great,” he said. “It will be a really good thing for the School of Global Studies to consolidate all its offices and departments and potential classrooms in one building.”
Taylor said the promise of a new Pardee building contributed to his decision to join the school as Dean in September 2022.
“It will take a couple more years, but coming to fruition is very exciting for me personally,” he said.
