University of Kentucky College of Design

The original warehouse building—with its open interior floors, repetitive structural grid, and distinct moments of sectional variation—offers a promising framework for uniting all of the CoD’s departments for the first time and accommodating future growth. To maximize interaction among people and disciplines, and expand opportunities for making and experimentation, the design both harnesses these existing conditions and bends them in a new direction.

A multi-directional steel stair and voids at different scales are inserted into the structure to create new gathering areas, as well as abundant daylight, sightlines, and physical connections between levels. Open studio spaces use the original timber columns, along with mobile pin-up walls and furniture designed and fabricated by CoD students, to demarcate each studio while staying visible and flexible for all. Shared tools and amenities, including a café and double-height lecture hall, are clustered near the building’s center to encourage students, faculty, and visitors to mix.

Outside, a new fabrication dock allows students and faculty to try out new forms of large-scale making while putting design on display to the wider University community. New trees and a structural canopy with subtly anthropomorphic steel members provide shade while also diminishing heat gain and contributing to passive cooling. A geothermal well system further lowers the building’s reliance on the energy grid.

From the detail scale upward, the project aims to demonstrate that reconciling past and future isn’t simply a matter of environmental necessity, it can also be a satisfying creative act of design and making.