KU Dean of Business Neeli Bendapudi discusses plans for the new business school, seen in renderings in her office in Summerfield Hall.

The south side of the newly designed KU School of Business building, shown here in a rendering, will include a dean's suite with a terrace behind it. Below the terrace is the roof to an underground auditorium that seats 350 students.

If Kansas University could find a way to convert the personal energy of business school dean Neeli Bendapudi into electricity, it could probably power the entire campus the year round without paying another energy bill.

That energy follows Bendapudi wherever she goes and tends to spread among the people around her and the projects she’s passionate about.

And no other project has Bendapudi quite as excited as the new KU School of Business building currently under construction on Naismith Drive across from Allen Fieldhouse.

Once built, the long-awaited facility will replace Summerfield Hall, with all its leaky pipes and undependable HVAC systems, as home of the school.

“I think it’s going to be a very significant space on campus,” Bendapudi said. “It will really position us for the next 50 years.”

If all goes according to plan, KU business students will enter “Capitol Federal Hall” for the first time in fall 2016. Naming courtesies went to the leaders of the Capitol Federal Foundation, which provided a $20 million lead gift for the project in 2012.

Altogether, the school raised more than $50 million dollars in private funds for the $65.7 million project, making it the largest privately funded project in the university’s history. (KU will also kick in $10 million to fund infrastructure costs.)

According to the school, the four-story, 155,000-square-foot building will house 19 classrooms, 202 offices and 350- and 125-seat auditoriums, plus space for research, computer labs, industry collaboration, professional development, a business incubator and break-out areas for student group work.

The exterior of the building will be dotted with windows to make it “open” and “transparent,” as Bendapudi describes it, while also incorporating some of the limestone and red roof look of KU’s iconic buildings on the hill.

Bendapudi and the school envision the building as a southern gateway to campus that will welcome students, businesses and visitors. On the inside, they hope the building will transform the way students learn and people interact.

The building will be split into two wings, with a central atrium between them. The north wing will hold faculty, advising and administrative offices, and the south wing will house student classrooms and labs. The open atrium between them will function as a commons area where designers and school officials hope people will stay, study, bump into one another and collaborate.

Classrooms will include infrastructure for new technologies and the latest models of education, such as flipped courses, which focus class time on small group applications while delivering lectures digitally so students can listen to them on their own time.

Building designs sprang from countless hours of research, surveys and focus groups to glean from students, faculty, alumni and community members what they wanted and needed from the building. Bendapudi said one of their main goals was making the building as student-friendly as possible.

Capitol Federal Hall could get even bigger. Before bulldozers even broke ground, the school was working to raise funds to construct an addition that would add 17,000 square feet to the original plans.

School officials reason that building on to the facility now would be far cheaper than in the future. And the school might need the space. Enrollment has grown far faster — by about 45 percent in the business undergraduate programs — than projected just a few years ago.

It’s yet one more thing for Bendapudi to get excited about.