The Sprott School of Business’ new home, the Nicol Building, is operational as Carleton students return to in-person classes.
Before the Nicol Building, Sprott was mostly housed in Dunton Tower. The Sprott dean’s executive assistant Deborah Casselman said the Nicol Building will allow Sprott students to meet and collaborate with each other more easily.
“It was hard for us to gather together [in Dunton Tower] because it was mostly office space, there were no classrooms in the building,” Casselman said.
Dana Brown, dean of the Sprott School of Business, said the Nicol Building’s classrooms were designed to promote interactive learning. Brown said the classrooms allow students to do group work and engage in discussions with ease.
“[The Nicol Building’s] classrooms are equipped with high flex technology, so that we can have some students in the class and we can be projecting to a wider audience,” Brown said.
The new technology will include video cameras set up to broadcast lectures to teleconferencing programs such as Zoom. Brown said the technology will accommodate students who can’t attend in-person classes due to the pandemic, Brown said.
The Nicol Building has seven stories, including the tunnel level. The ground level houses the Innovation Hub, the school’s research and resource centres and lots of seating. The Innovation Hub is a space for entrepreneurs from Sprott to collaborate with each other.
The two floors above the ground level house student spaces and classrooms. The top three floors have staff and faculty offices, as well as workspaces for graduate students to study.
According to Casselman, the building’s construction began in 2018 and the university took possession of the building in July of 2021.
The Nicol Building was built with sustainability and energy efficiency in mind, Casselman said.
According to the Sprott School of Business’ website, the use of BubbleDeck technology significantly reduced the amount of concrete used, which lowered the building’s carbon footprint. Instead of concrete slabs, the building features 10-inch hollow balls of recycled plastic around which concrete is poured.
The building also has a Bridgehead cafe built into its ground level. Bridgehead is an Ottawa-based coffee shop which has a contract with the Sprott school.
“The reason they’re a good fit for the building and for Sprott is that their mission and their strategies align a lot with ours on sustainability,” Casselman said.
Javeria Chaudhry, a fourth-year management student at Carleton, said “[The Nicol Building is] beautiful, it’s very sleek. It’s nice and clean.”
Chaudhry was not alone. Jennifer Gore, a fourth-year marketing student at Carleton, also said the building feels very modern.
“It feels like it’s a new university in a sense, which I know Carleton is trying to do with the new logo,” Gore said.
Chaudhry and Gore both said they found it was difficult for business students to collaborate and connect with each other in Dunton Tower’s Sprott lounge.
“I used to go to the Sprott lounge quite often and it was essentially just a little room — probably capacity of 10 to 15 people and I would only see my friends, so I didn’t really get to meet new people,” Chaudhry said.
The building is named after the late Wes Nicol, a Carleton alumnus. Wes donated $10 million to the Sprott School of Business, according to its website.
“[Wes Nicol] had a real passion for supporting students who wanted to start new things, new ventures, new businesses,” Brown said. “He really believed in what we were doing and his donation reflected that.”
Brown said the installation of the Innovation Hub and the welcoming of the Technology and Innovation Management program to the building would resonate with the late Nicol, who she said greatly supported entrepreneurship.
“The building is now there as a building, but it will come to life as we use it. That’s part of just the way a building works, you can only do so much before people go in it,” Brown said. “We’re looking forward to welcoming students in as soon as possible.”
Featured image by Spencer Colby.
