USC Trojan Family Magazine - Spring 2000: In Support: Open for Business

The opening of Lewis and Popovich halls in time for last fall’s beginning of classes capped one of the busiest summer construction periods ever at USC, with more than 100 projects.
In fact, construction approached the level of the previous summer, when 150 individual projects, worth more than $70 million, made 1998 the most active period since the Norman Topping era of the 1960s.
Lewis and Popo-vich Halls flank a dramatic new entrance to USC on Exposition Boulevard. Campus visitors proceed down the newly named USC Pardee Way, past arched brick loggias framed by trees and fountains, toward the first university building, Widney Alumni House.
The $19 million Popovich Hall, largest of the projects at 55,000 square feet, houses the MBA programs for the Marshall School of Business. It is distinguished by a brick-and-concrete tower that extends above its third-story tile roof, a sun-lit three-story lobby, and a café – available to everyone on campus – that opens onto a landscaped courtyard.
Inside, Popovich boasts features that make the Marshall program the most technologically advanced business school in the country, including eight tiered case-study rooms with data and electrical connections; 13 “experiential learning classrooms” that can accommodate groups of five to 10 students practicing business presentations; and more than 1,100 data connections and 15 miles of fiberoptic and cable wiring.
Lewis Hall, which houses the academic and administrative pro-grams of USC’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development, was dedicated last August. The three-story, $10.6 million building contains two large lecture halls with data and electrical connections at each seat, and three studio rooms especially designed for small groups and collaborative learning.

Other projects in-cluded off-campus stu-dent housing renovations; the School of Cinema-TV’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts in the former Performing Arts Annex on Figueroa Street; and strengthening the first and second floors of the Gwynn Wilson Student Union to improve the building’s resistance to earthquakes, along with renovation of the first-floor offices of the Career Planning and Place-ment Center.
Also, remodeling of the Safety and Systems Management Building to accommodate new music practice rooms, classrooms and administrative space as well as a joint program between the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering; and the renovation of 23 general-purpose classrooms at the Von KleinSmid Center and Waite Phillips Hall as part of the university’s multi-phase classroom upgrade project.