This new six-story, 90,000-square-foot home for a college of business and public management prepares students for an increasingly networked, highly collaborative future.

Each floor features a variety of academic classrooms along with dramatic multi-level common spaces that enable students to interact, collaborate, study and relax throughout the day.

Reinforcing the “cave”-like concept, a faceted ceiling in the main lecture hall steps up to open sightlines to the top rows.

The folded, faceted ceiling animates the common areas and guides students through the space.

The college of business and public management at the university wanted to unite its four departments — the schools of global business; accounting and finance; criminal justice and public administration; and management, marketing and international business — under one roof, along with the dean’s office and the university’s small business development center.

The design is oriented around a series of portals, which frame views that visually connect academic departments, learning spaces and active common areas, or express the building’s structure or function as benches.

The portals were inspired by the idea that higher education frames new ways of seeing the world and requires intense, tunnel-like focus with a light — graduation — at the end.

Faceting also extends to the fire-rated, electric-green monumental stair and the graphic, green core wall that anchors every floor and provides a writable surface for collaboration.

Because libraries now focus less on storage and more on community and making connections — between ideas and people — the sixth floor is an open, “virtual” library, where students interact in person and access information via laptop. It also opens to outdoor terraces and green roofs with panoramic views overlooking the campus and New York City beyond.