USC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications will move to a 52-year-old brick building on the Horseshoe in August 2015.
The journalism school, which has been housed in the Carolina Coliseum since 1969, celebrated its “groundbreaking” on Feb. 3 at the former Health Sciences building at Greene and Sumter streets.
The 54,000-square-foot building will be transformed into an open, engaging environment where about 1,500 undergraduate and graduate students will take classes. The $25 million project will provide nearly double the space that the journalism school currently has.
“We’ve physically and philosophically outgrown the Coliseum. It’s an inflexible blockhouse, but we’re in a time when the media landscape is vast, evolving and unconfined by real or virtual walls,” said Charles Bierbauer, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, in a release. “We also think communications is central to any and every part of the university. And so, the school should be central and visible in its features and functions.”
Dating back to 1923, USC’s journalism school is one of the oldest in the country. The Boudreaux Group, a Columbia architectural firm with prior experience at the university and in repurposing buildings, has worked closely with the school to design a facility with a focus on current and future needs.
“I think it’s moving the journalism school to the new millennium,” Brett Williams, a first-year broadcast journalism student who spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony, said. “I think these new improvements will make the journalism school second to none.”
The school has also been approved to build an approximately 1,400-square-foot “greenhouse” studio adjacent to the school’s main building, courtesy of a $1.5 million pledge in 2011 by an anonymous donor.