“It will be the hub of the campus, it will evolve after I’m not around, it will touch almost everyone,” Mr. Schwarzman said of the center, whose completion is expected to be underwritten by his donation alone.

A portion of the gift — $20 million — will be used for the center’s presentations and operations. Yale will contribute an additional $2 million a year for 10 years, starting in 2019, for programming and staff.

Yale was thinking mainly of sprucing up the Commons complex when it approached Mr. Schwarzman for help. The three buildings need an upgrade — including Memorial Hall, where the names of Yale graduates who died in military conflicts from the Revolution to Vietnam are inscribed.

But Mr. Schwarzman, the chairman, chief executive and a co-founder of the Blackstone Group, the asset management company, said he did not want to just put his name on a renovated building.

“I like creating new things,” he said, citing as an example the scholarship master’s degree program modeled partly on the Rhodes scholarships that he recently started at Tsinghua University in Beijing — called Schwarzman Scholars — to which he has contributed $100 million. “In the charitable world, I find myself giving to large projects that I think can make a large-scale impact.”

Mr. Schwarzman had several discussions with Mr. Salovey, in which they found themselves re-envisioning Commons as a place to unite the various constituencies on campus — undergraduates, graduate and professional students, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as members of the public — even as it raised Yale’s profile.