“When you walk into this building, you are walking into the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” says Sanjeev Khagram, Dean, CEO, and Director General of Thunderbird School of Global Management. The building of which he speaks is the F. Francis and Dionne Najafi Thunderbird Global Headquarters. This is the new home for the storied Thunderbird School at Arizona State University. The school celebrated its 75th year this year by opening the doors on its new building in downtown Phoenix.
Moore Ruble Yudell and Jones Studio designed the new headquarters for the Thunderbird School of Global Management as an urban incubator dedicated to education for business and leadership management in the digital age. The global headquarters is built for the Fourth Industrial Revolution — a time when new technologies are merging the physical, biological, and digital worlds. The architecture of the 110,000-square-foot building is a physical and technological framework for 21 st-century learning — and it is the heart of the school’s global network of learning hubs. Thunderbird is not just a school or a place, it is a global concept.
Thunderbird’s new global headquarters creates opportunities for onsite student consulting projects in emerging markets, cross-disciplinary concentrations, access to resources and international expertise through Thunderbird’s worldwide alumni network of more than 45,000 global professionals. The new headquarters models the leading edge of technology and global connectivity by bringing together diverse perspectives of business and leadership management in one global place.
Within the facilities, students connect with the world in real-time using active and multi-dimensional technologies, which remain flexible for emerging technological innovations. With a modular approach to space planning, and AV and IT fit for future plug-and-play, the headquarters is prepared to adapt to short and long term needs of all users. All communal gathering spaces are designed for multi-use programming, with the ability to quickly transform from a study space to collaborative work or event space. In this way, Thunderbird becomes a central hub for both planned and serendipitous interaction.
