The Historian’s Notebook: Building Enduring Spaces for Teaching

The Historian’s Notebook: 50 Years of Business & Society is a blog series created in preparation for the 50th anniversary of Yale SOM in September 2026. The series is written by Yale SOM’s resident historian, Michelle Spinelli. Reach out if you have an idea for a blog post, memories or photos to share, or an inquiry about SOM history.

When Yale SOM moved from the mansions of Hillhouse Avenue to its brand-new campus, Edward P. Evans Hall, in January 2014, the school’s classroom space doubled. But there’s more to the story than just numbers. New classrooms enabled SOM to expand pedagogically as well. And the story of the classroom design helps illustrate how central teaching and learning were to the conception of the new campus.

Initial planning for Evans Hall got underway between 2006 and 2008, just as SOM was launching its new integrated core curriculum and pioneering the raw case study. So architect Norman Foster ARCH ’62 and his firm Foster + Partners had pedagogy in mind as they started imagining what classrooms at Evans might look like and what attributes they might have.

Guided by then Deputy Dean Stanley Garstka, and with input from a wide variety of faculty, staff, and students, the architects considered an array of issues important to classroom design, including course content, styles of teaching, the number of students in a class, soundproofing, technology needs, seat spacing, furniture, and teaching tools such as whiteboards, blackboards, and a podium.

With the curriculum still evolving as the architects began their planning, Garstka knew that flexibility was key. We had to “minimize risk and maximize flexibility,” he told me in a recent interview. Nothing, especially technology, could be locked in.

Garstka and Diane Palmeri, then SOM’s chief administrative officer, met regularly with Foster’s team, representatives from university administration, and SOM’s IT department to hash out plans for what Garstka called “teaching spaces.” In 2010, Garstka told the Yale Daily News, “We’re trying to create environments where we’re limited only by the imagination of faculty.”

To engage faculty in the design process, the architects went a step further. Within a warehouse on Yale’s West Campus, about 25 minutes from the central campus, they built a full-scale mock classroom out of plywood, so faculty members could offer feedback before plans were finalized. About 30 SOM faculty members visited West Campus to view the mock classroom over several days, offering impressions and suggestions.

“The whole idea of a mock-up classroom is to basically figure out how to tweak it to make it better,” Garstka told the Yale Daily News.

Seating between 65 and 85 students—the size of a Yale MBA cohort—the mock classroom was shaped like a U, with tiered seats facing each other; blackboards, projector screens, and a podium ran across the top of the U.

U-shaped classrooms are intended to facilitate conversation among students and are thus ideally suited for teaching via the case method. In fact, the shape of the classroom originated at Harvard Business School, which pioneered the case method. The HBS “case classroom” is still used for case discussion in business schools across the country.

But at Yale SOM, all four room styles (case classrooms, lecture halls, boardroom-style classrooms, and two “theater-in-the-rounds”) had to be multipurpose and able to accommodate different styles of teaching, including team teaching, which became an integral part of the curriculum.

One faculty member, Fiona Scott Morton, told the Yale Daily News that she felt the U-shaped orientation did not offer a clear view of the board. Another faculty member, Judith Chevalier, noted to the newspaper that she liked the U-shape format for student discussion but didn’t think it would work for lectures.

Another question that prompted some controversy was whether classrooms should be equipped with whiteboards or blackboards. Later, Garstka sent out a memo to faculty asking for their preference, but it didn’t resolve the issue—the response, he remembers, was split 49% to 51%. In the end, one floor of classrooms was built with blackboards and the other with whiteboards—and the rooms are constructed in such a way that any of the boards can be ripped out and switched at a low cost.

Architects also made other adjustments in response to faculty comments, including altering some of the U-shaped rooms to enable faculty members to teach on the long side of the classroom as opposed to the narrow end. This change, Garstka said at the time, would give students a better view of the board.

Garstka continued to solicit faculty feedback on classroom design even after the mock classroom came down. Following visits to several business schools to assess their podiums, Garstka gathered three models to try out with faculty and students. He had people stand in all the corners of a classroom as they tested the height of the podiums and the sound of the microphones. With none of the models quite fitting the bill, SOM ended up designing its own. “We all agreed,” he told me, that “we wanted a podium that went up and down. It had to be adjustable.”

Garstka also had to grapple with rapidly changing technology, which is why technology was added at the last minute and was designed to accommodate upgrades and changes as needed. At a minimum, each classroom was designed to have at least three screens to facilitate remote participation. Two classrooms were also built with translation booths, allowing for real-time translation.

Evans Hall ultimately opened with 16 classrooms, each able to accommodate multiple teaching styles and equipped with the best technology available. If need be, the classrooms can also be knocked down and rebuilt without affecting the building’s structural integrity. With this level of flexibility, Evans is well-positioned to take on whatever the future of management education may hold.