UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN APPOINTS BIG TO COMPLETE SPACE PLANNING AND DESIGN

The University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design has appointed BIG to complete space planning, programming, and concept design for the multidisciplinary design school. After a decade of increasing enrollment numbers and expanded program offerings, the school is working to transform its facilities to accommodate recent growth and upgrade academic spaces. By taking advantage of existing facility strengths in the heart of KU’s Lawrence campus, BIG will develop a plan that visualizes a redesigned home for the school that respects the established character of the site while also being optimized for innovative teaching and research. “For an architect, each project is kicked off with a crash course seeking to educate ourselves in an entirely new field, because we rarely design for other architects (they tend to do that themselves). In this case – with our first design for a school of architecture and design – I feel like I have been preparing for this on a daily basis for the last three decades,” said BIG Founder and Creative Director Bjarke Ingels. “We want to create the physical framework for future generations of Kansas form-givers, architects and designers – a space that provokes unexpected encounters, triggers critical conversations and builds new bridges between discourses and skill sets, arts, crafts and technologies. The design work is just about to begin, even if my research for it started a generation ago.”