Last Friday, Carnegie Mellon selected PJ Dick as construction manager for what is called the Forbes Morewood project. Depending on the final scope and schedule the project will be somewhere between $20 million and $30 million but its impact will be much bigger. A lot of the work will be focused on changing and updating the university’s “headquarters” – Warner Hall – but the latter phases of the project will form the physical linkage between CMU’s iconic “Cut” to the new north campus under development.

The importance of the north campus development is that it is going to be the home of what CMU’s visionaries, especially Pres. Subra Suresh, see as the future home of its corporate partners. Under Jared Cohon’s leadership, CMU upped its game in technology transfer, which is the commercialization of its research in new technologies across many industries. More recently, Google’s explosive growth has shown a spotlight on the talent at CMU and highlighted the value that a company can derive from working closely with the university. Dr. Suresh’s vision for what is being dubbed the “Tepper campus” – because the new home of the Tepper School of Business will anchor the development – involves corporate partners locating on the university grounds. This same concept has become bricks and mortar at MIT, Stanford and other schools, and clearly CMU intends to be among that group.

Imagine turning left onto Forbes from Craig at the end of this decade, driving past a hotel filled with corporate visitors and a new incubator-style office between the Hollow and Scaife Gallery, and on up a Forbes Avenue that has a town center spanning the street and connecting to a new campus that has the Amazon Building or the GE Building or the Uber Building or all three. By that time, the Gates/Hillman and Scott Halls will have filled in the east side of Panther Hollow and connected all of the science buildings together. The flow of research and information from the minds learning chemistry, nanotechnology, information technology, physics, etc. will cross Forbes to reach those entities that can apply that enormous knowledge to the real world.

If the vision is fulfilled, there will be a lot of money made by that flow of information. Southeastern Oakland is not going to become the new Silicon Valley but it doesn’t have to to have a transformative effect on Pittsburgh’s overall economy. So if you have to go from Oakland to Squirrel Hill over the next few years, maybe don’t detour around all the mess on Forbes Avenue. Take the time to witness something that will make your life a bit easier in the long run.