For the last fifty years, faculty and staff with the College of Business Administration at Kansas State University have been wanting a new building, and on Friday the first shovels hit the dirt.

The ground-breaking was held Friday morning on the future site of the new building, near N. Manhattan Avenue and Lovers Lane, just east of the university president’s residence.

The new building will be 140,000 square feet, nearly three times the size of the current building, Calvin Hall. Ali Malekzadeh, Edgerley family dean of the College of Business Administration, explained some of the features that the new building will offer. “We’ll have state of the art classrooms, we’ll have specialized laboratories for students to do work,” Malekzadeh said. He also mentioned that everybody has an app, and that students will have the opportunity to be able to build them. “We’ll give them opportunities in the new business school building to do that.”

Alumni have stepped up to donate the money for the building. “We have raised $33.5 million in one year from the alumni and $15 million from the university, so we’re going to make this happen.”

Actual construction work isn’t expected to start until August of 2014, and is to be completed July of 2016.