Inside NEOMA €149M Reims Campus , Designed To Draw Students To Physical Spaces

yahoo.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Artist rendering of NEOMA Business School’s new Reims campus, highlighting the light-filled “Hive,” a timber-framed central hub designed to foster collaboration and informal student engagement.In February 2021, with the pandemic still raging, Poets&Quants named NEOMA Business School in France one of five European Business Schools to Watch for its flashy, new virtual campus – an immersive Minecraft-like island of lecture halls, breakout rooms, and digital hangouts where student avatars could roam at will.The project quickly became known as NEOMA’s “fourth campus,” alongside its physical sites in Paris, Reims, and Rouen. Media outlets from Bloomberg to the Financial Times took notice. So did we.Five years later, NEOMA is making another bold campus bet, this time designed to pull students out of the digital world and firmly back into the physical one. A new €149 million campus will open to Reims students this September, one of the most visible investments in NEOMA’s ongoing five-year Engage for the Future strategy.“After the pandemic—and given that mental health has become a key issue for young generations—it is very important to encourage them to get together and do things in person,” dean Delphine Manceau tells P&Q. “We want to give them the space to build projects, interact with their professors, and spend time in sports and non-curricular activities. Having amazing campuses is a key element.”A CAMPUS BUILT FOR ENGAGEMENTIn December, Poets&Quants joined a group of international journalists for a hard-hat tour of Reims’ new campus.At the building’s heart is the Hive, a light-filled hub ringed by open rooms, balconies, and informal workspaces framed in sustainable timber. The space is designed to pull students out of classrooms and into one another’s orbit, much like a beehive draws activity toward a shared center. In an era when learning can happen anywhere, NEOMA wants its physical campus to be a place students actively choose to be.“We wanted to design this inner heart, the place you meet, where you do not sit in classrooms,” says Søren Øllgaard, lead designer and partner at Henning Larsen, a Danish architecture firm.“This is where you sit, hang out on balconies. There’s the library, that’s the restaurant. This is where everything happens.”Lead designer Søren Øllgaard of Henning Larsen presents plans for NEOMA Business School’s new Reims campus during a briefing with international journalists.Student association spaces will occupy nearly an entire wing of the building with plans for a dance studio, crafts workshop, and dedicated music rooms. The campus will be accessible by foot, car, bike, or scooter — and even by kayak via the canal that runs along the site. A €10 million sports complex will sit directly behind the main building to promote student well being and connection.The campus will also feature a multifunctional restaurant and café, along with nearly 8,000 square meters of outdoor space, including gardens and terraces on every floor and a rooftop terrace with 360-degree views of Reims. Throughout the building, designers carved out nooks, booths, and informal gathering areas intended to encourage spontaneous interaction and small-group work.The new building will be a focal point of Reims’ Port Colbert district, transforming the former industrial zone into a student-centered hub.Henning Larson, founded in 1959 by a namesake known in the business as the “master of light,” beat out 41 other proposals with its design. (The firm also designed the Enterprise Research Campus at Harvard University, University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Linder College of Business, and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany.)Q&A WITH DEAN DELPHINE MANCEAUThe Reims campus is phase two of a broader facilities push totaling nearly €300 million.Delphine Manceau, Dean NEOMA Business SchoolWhen it opens, the 35,000-square-meter building will serve roughly 4,700 students across undergraduate, master’s, PhD, and continuing education programs. Plans call for 85 classrooms, two 120-seat lecture theaters, and a 750-seat auditorium designed for both school and community events.Throughout, it is designed to align with the three pillars of NEOMA’s Engage strategy. For example, Engage for Society, is reflected in the building’s sustainability ambitions and material choices. The campus is pursuing LEED certification for environmental performance, WELL certification for occupant health and well-being, and E+C (Effinature), which focuses on biodiversity and the project’s ecological integration with the surrounding neighborhood.The new building will also be a major feather in the cap of dean Delphine Manceau who took over the top role in 2017, just four years after the business school was formed with the merger of Reims Management School and Rouen Business School.We recently sat down with Manceau to talk about the new Reims campus and how it fits in with NEOMA’S broader strategy. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Let’s start with an overview of NEOMA’s five-year strategic plan, Engage for the Future.Many things are changing these days in terms of business, jobs, technology, and the international environment. When we set up this strategy two and a half years ago, I think we anticipated many of the changes that are happening now.The plan has three pillars. The first is about continuing to improve our academic excellence in terms of teaching and learning, but also research, and adapting to new topics and new ways of teaching and learning.AI is an important part of this pillar because it obviously changes the way we teach, the way we assess our students, and the way we do research. It is also a key topic of research. We have an Area of Excellence called Future of Work, where we analyze how jobs are impacted by AI. Of course, this leads us to reinvent and question what we teach, how we teach, and what the key skills are that our students need.The second pillar is called Engage for Students. After the pandemic—and given that mental health has become a key issue for young generations, along with the time they spend on screens—it is very important to encourage them to get together and do things in person, build projects, interact with their professors, and spend time in sports and non-curricular activities. Having strong campuses is a key element.As I often say, it is really important that we work at the same time on our physical campuses and on our digital strategy because it is very important to think about both together, and not to have, on one hand, a digital strategy and, on the other hand, a real estate approach.Also in this Engage for Students pillar, we are working a lot on our international cooperations because we strongly believe that young students should spend several months abroad to understand how other cultures think so that, in the future, they are able to do business wisely.The third pillar is called Engage for Society. It focuses a lot on the environment, climate change, biodiversity, student diversity, and faculty diversity—having a wide range of profiles among both faculty and students.Right now, I think more than 80% of our faculty are international, coming from all over the world—Iran, Korea, Spain, the U.S., Canada, and Latin America, including Colombia and Brazil. It is usually the first time in our students’ lives that they meet people from so many different parts of the world and have professors with such cultural diversity. This is also part of their learning experience, so we continue to work a lot on diversity.We also invest significantly in scholarships so that money is not a barrier. We select our students based on their academic level, but if we see they have difficulty paying tuition fees, we provide scholarships or jobs, or help them obtain a loan, so that finances are not an obstacle.International journalists tour the construction site of NEOMA Business School’s new €149 million Reims campus during a December hard-hat visit.How does the new Reims campus fit into NEOMA’s larger facilities plan?About seven years ago, we bought our building in Paris and created a new Paris campus. We completely emptied and refurbished it. That was step one, and it was very important.It was also a kind of test-and-learn phase, because what we tried on the Paris campus has been very useful for what we are doing right now. In Paris, the campus is 6,500 square meters across five levels and serves about 1,500 students. It also functions as a hub because Paris sits between our two other campuses. When faculty, staff, or students from both campuses want to meet, they gather in Paris.Phase two is happening now. In Reims, we used to have two different campuses about a 15-minute walk apart, and both had become too small as the school expanded. It took us a few years to find the right location, but now we are building a large new campus of 35,000 square meters. A French journalist who visited recently said it is going to be the most beautiful campus in France. It is a very ambitious project.Phase three will focus on our campus in Rouen in the Normandy region, where we have an amazing park with a castle. It is very beautiful, almost like a U.S. campus in the sense that it is surrounded by nature with a large park. That is quite unusual in France. We also have this small 19th-century castle that students love. We do not want to move because it is an exceptional place, but we do need to rethink how the campus is organized.In the coming years, once we finish in Reims, we will work on improving the Rouen campus and rethinking it in terms of the student experience. For instance, from the bottom of the park you can see the Seine River. It is quite remarkable, and we want to create dedicated spaces so students can enjoy it even more.Can you share the financial details of the new campus—how much it costs and how it’s being funded? Do you have a foundation like U.S. schools?The project totals €149 million. That includes t