Gifts To Support Welcome Center, Tepper Quad

Carnegie Mellon University will have a new gateway to greet friends, parents and future students thanks in part to $8 million in recent gifts for the University Welcome Center and related construction on the Tepper Quadrangle.

The gifts include:

CMU Trustee David Coulter (TPR'71) and his wife, Susan Weeks Coulter, have pledged $5 million for the new University Welcome Center;
Two additional gifts of $1 million or more from:
- Per G.H. Lofberg (TPR'73) for general support of Tepper Quad construction; and
- An anonymous donor has pledged $1 million, also for general support of the project.

Total gift commitments for Tepper Quad construction are now at nearly $104 million, including the historic $67 million original commitment by David A. Tepper (TPR'82) in November 2013 that initiated this university-wide effort.

"There has been a wonderful outpouring of support for the project, and many other conversations about support are now in progress," said CMU President Subra Suresh.

The Tepper Quad, which is planned for the area occupied by Morewood Parking Lot, promises to become an iconic new sector of the Pittsburgh campus north of Forbes Avenue.

The first building to be built on Tepper Quad will provide critically needed infrastructure and space, intellectual and social connections, and opportunities for the entire CMU community. As a forward-looking academic building, along with the University Welcome Center, it will house:

the largest auditorium on the campus with sufficient flexibility to create state-of-the-art and globally connected academic spaces for all CMU students;
a new home for the Tepper School of Business, which will support infrastructure for forging strategic alliances with other units on campus and planning for future growth;
new dining and fitness facilities for the campus;
facilities to foster technology-enhanced teaching and learning, and to coordinate the on-campus and global activities of the Simon Initiative;
facilities to help enhance innovation and entrepreneurship activities, global industry connections and technology transfer;
gathering and meeting spaces for students and faculty from across campus;
significant flexibility in reconfiguring physical space in response to programmatic, demographic and curricular changes and opportunities; and
shell space for the design of new interdisciplinary activities that benefit a number of campus units.

The first building in the Tepper Quad will add nearly 300,000 total square feet of new space to the university's physical infrastructure. It also will foster the creation of a vibrant Forbes Avenue Innovation Corridor, leveraging CMU's renowned innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, establishing stronger connections to the University of Pittsburgh and other institutions, and enhancing the economic vibrancy of the city and the region.

This past summer, Moore Ruble Yudell was selected as architects for the project, and the firm is already deeply engaged with campus stakeholders in the design process. Site development on the project is scheduled to begin in early summer 2015.

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