College of Business & Economics Building

Reynolds Hall is a 108,000-sf, six-story steel frame academic building for West Virginia University’s Chambers College of Business and Economics. Located along the Monongahela River on the site of the former Stansbury Hall Field House, the building features a 300- seat lecture hall, multiple lounge spaces, a trading room, hospitality and economic simulation labs, learning pavilion, a social staircase, classrooms, study rooms, offices for faculty and staff, and the Ideation Hub, a second-story collaborative space that is hung from the steel framing at the floor structure above so that it appears to float above the open lobby space. In a nod to the site’s history, part of the Stansbury Hall basketball court is mounted on a wall on the third floor.

The project also includes a new, 31-ton, structural steel pedestrian bridge, which replaced an aging pedestrian bridge built in 1972. The architectural design required no cross-bracing members between the panel points of the truss top chords, so the design engaged the bottom truss chords as torsion beams, forming a U-shape structure at panel points. This “U” was comprised of a bridge floor infill beam, a truss bottom chord HSS (hollow structural section) member at each side of the bridge, and cantilevered vertical web members.