The University of Kansas’ School of Architecture and Design has appointed Bjarke Ingels Group to design a new multidisciplinary design school. BIG’s commission, which includes space planning, programming, and concept design, seeks to establish a “redesigned home for the school that respects the established character of the site while also being optimized for innovative teaching and research.”

The school’s expansion follows a decade of increasing enrolment numbers and an expanded program offering. While details of BIG’s proposal have not yet been announced, the school suggests that BIG’s plan will involve an engagement with the school’s existing facilities on Jayhawk Boulevard.

"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),” said Bjarke Ingels in a statement. “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.”

“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,” Ingels added. “The design work is just about to begin, even if my research started a generation ago.”

Having been selected from a shortlist of four firms, BIG will present analysis and initial concepts to the school in April, followed by completed project documents and renderings in June.

News of the appointment comes one year after the University of Kansas selected Mahbub Rashid as the new dean of the School of Architecture and Design. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students from the school also converted twelve shipping containers to serve as private housing for homeless people.