Harvard Dedicates Tata Hall
Last week, Harvard Business School held a dedication ceremony for its new building, Tata Hall. The building will house students for Harvard’s executive education programs. The building is seven-stories, and it cost $100-million dollars. The architects William Rawn Associates designed the concave glass and stone structure. The building contains 179 bedroom suites, two 99-seat classrooms, and study lounges.
Tata Hall was designed with sustainability in mind. The building is powered in part by a rooftop photovoltaic array, that reduces the building’s energy consumption by 50 percent and greenhouse gases by 40 percent. The rooms offer individualized control of heating and cooling, which reduces energy use. The building also features other technology that reduces water consumption by 900,000 gallons a year.
Tata Hall was underwritten by Ratan Tata, who served as chair of the Indian conglomerate Tata Sons Ltd. from 1991 to 2012. Tara has worked closely with the school’s executive education program for several years. Tata also attended Harvard’s Advanced Management Program in 1975, and said of the program: “Those 13 weeks were the most important time of my life in the way they transformed me and increased my perspective.”
Approximately 10,000 executives attend Harvard’s on-campus educational programs each year, so the school needs plenty of space for its executive students. The new building will complete Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Quad. The Executive Education campus features the Kresge dining hall, the Glass Hall administration building, the McArthur, Mellon, and Baker residence halls, and the academic buildings McCollum and Hawes Hall.
