Construction on a number of projects at the Mendoza College of Business began in February, including a new addition to the building. The north addition, which is set to be completed for the start of the 2026-27 academic year, will include new classrooms, collaborative areas and offices for staff and faculty.
Dean Martijn Cremers shared that construction was originally not supposed to begin until later, but the start was pushed up to align with the goal of opening in August 2026.
In addition to the expansion of the building, two projects are ongoing inside the building. The Mendoza Behavioral Lab, located in the basement of the northwest wing, will be a dedicated space for research. The third project is a state-of-the-art trading room, set to occupy the northeast corner of the atrium.
The first floor of the north addition, which will completely fill in the north side of the building's courtyard, will feature a new classroom space meant primarily for teaching foundations of business classes to large sections. Similar to the auditorium in the basement of Geddes Hall, which currently hosts some of the foundations classes, the new classroom will have a limited number of rows and a gentle elevation change from front to back.
“Students in the north auditorium are going to have a permanent desk with a chair they can move around, and they will have a lot more space,” Cremers said. “We designed the whole thing so that students will never be too far away from the professor.”
Surrounding the new classroom will be a large undergraduate student lounge featuring couches and collaboration spaces. Cremers shared that the lounge is part of a larger effort by the College to create a strong community within Mendoza by encouraging students to spend more time in the building.
“The idea is for it to be a space where we hope our undergraduates will be glad to spend time studying, hanging out, waiting before class and spending time in between classes,” Cremers said.
The second and third floors will be mostly offices, additionally including a few classrooms and conference rooms. Cremers added that there will also be some sort of outdoor terrace that students can utilize in the warmer months.
The projection system in Jordan auditorium is also set to be replaced during the construction process. The current screen will be replaced with an LED video wall.
The construction will impact the day to day operations of Mendoza as well as its students and faculty over the next 18 months. The entrances on the north side of the building, facing DeBartolo Hall, will be closing during the construction. According to Cremers, those two doors are likely the most used out of all the entrances to the building.
“We're gonna change the normal flow for students and faculty and staff coming in and out of our building,” Cremers said. “It's actually worse than that, because the eastern entrance, we would like to discourage people from using that unless you’re leaving campus.”
Trucks, materials and other heavy machinery will be going back and forth to the construction site via a path between Mendoza and Duncan Student Center. While the eastern entrance will remain open, it will primarily be used by people walking to the parking lot.
In addition to the new build, progress is underway on the two specialty spaces inside the building. The trading room, set to open in the fall of 2025, will be a space for student collaboration and work.
The new space will include “wall-to-wall video boards and racetrack-style stock tickers around the outside glass walls and inside above the workstations, which will provide access to industry-leading platforms like FactSet, Bloomberg, and CapIQ,” Jason Reed, faculty director at the Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing (NDIGI), wrote in a comment to The Observer.
Reed shared that students will be able to study in the trading room, furthering the College’s goal of creating community.
“We expect students to utilize this space similarly to other computer and collaborative spaces on campus,” Reed wrote. “Aside from student collaboration and work, the college plans to host some lectures, presentations, and guests inside the new space.”
Official construction on the trading room space will not begin until April, since its eventual site is currently occupied by an office suite. Cremers shared that a former lounge space is undergoing some changes in order to accommodate those offices for the time being.
“We think of that as a temporary solution while we are figuring out a more permanent solution for the staff who are being permanently displaced,” Cremers said.
The least visible construction project, the Mendoza Behavioral Lab, is already underway in the basement of the northwest wing. 2,500 square feet of space, formerly occupied by Café Commons and a classroom, is set to be dedicated to research space.
“It’s going to be very important for our faculty in certain groups,” Cremers said. “Think about consumer behavior in marketing and organizational behavior in management and organization.”
Currently, researchers operate out of two classrooms in the Mendoza basement, which Cremers said limits the scope of possible research. Most of the projects rely on students to be subjects in the behavioral studies.
“You can do much more if you have a permanent specialized setup so that you can do these studies anytime, especially during times that are much more convenient for students,” he said.
