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School of Architecture & Design announces fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design Fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series begins this week with a lecture by Kay Sargent, an interior designer and author working at the forefront of workplace design and research. She will discuss how the growth of remote and hybrid work, coupled with artificial intelligence, has radically shifted the workplace. Her talk will take place at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 12.
KU wins grant to increase Lawrence campus awareness of university values
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas won a nearly $700,000 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University to help raise awareness and extend the impact of KU’s IRISE Culture Charter for the Lawrence campus. The IRISE Culture Charter was developed in 2023 to articulate five shared values — integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship and excellence — Jayhawks embody as members of the university community. Outreach will include service-learning activities, course modules and a publication.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Dan Rolf, School of Architecture & Design, 785-864-3027, [email protected]
School of Architecture & Design announces fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design Fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series begins Sept. 12 with a lecture by Kay Sargent, an interior designer and author working at the forefront of workplace design and research.
The explosive growth of remote and hybrid work in recent years has forced companies and organizations of all sizes to radically rethink the concept of the workplace. Now coupled with the rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI), there is an urgent need for workplaces to evolve to meet this moment. Sargent’s lecture, “Future-casting: Where are we now and how is the workplace evolving?,” will examine key factors that are currently or soon will be impacting the spaces where people work, live and play.
The KU Architecture Lecture Series welcomes architectural and experiential design leaders to the University of Kansas to illuminate new ideas and inspire purpose-driven design practice. Lecturers bring a wide range of expertise in areas such as sustainable building, digital environments, public interest design, historic preservation, health and wellness design, and more.
Fall 2025 lecture series events will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the John C. Gaunt Forum in Marvin Hall on the KU campus in Lawrence.
Sept. 12: Kay Sargent
“Future-casting: Where are we now, and how is the workplace evolving?”
Sargent is a practicing, licensed and certified interior designer, author, and director of thought leadership, interiors, at HOK. With 40 years of experience, she uses design to transform how and where people work. Sargent leads project teams that solve clients’ business and organizational challenges related to real estate business process, strategic planning, workplace strategy, change management and designing for inclusion. Sargent is author of the 2025 book “Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces,” which addresses sensory processing, cognitive well-being and neurodiversity in the build environment and how to address it to create neuroinclusive spaces.
Oct. 17: Albena Yaneva
“The Venetian Experiment: An Ethnography of the Architecture Biennale”
Biennales — large international exhibitions held every two years — have occupied a central place in architectural discourse. The existing academic work on the biennale is scarce and commonly engages with curatorial themes and the transformative cultural agency of the event rather than the mechanics of planning and curating. Based on findings from an ethnographic study of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2025, titled “Intelligens,” Yaneva traces the work of curatorial assistants, exhibition designers, participants, graphic designers, editors, production and public program coordinators — not just the chief curator. Going beyond official press announcements and exhibition catalogs, Yaneva’s study directs attention to the whole “theatre of operations” of conceptual and technical work that takes place behind the scenes.
Yaneva is a sociologist and an architectural theorist whose research crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy. She is a professor at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Yaneva is the author of eight books, including “Architecture After Covid” (Bloomsbury 2023) and “New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene” (World Scientific Publishing 2020), co-written with Nobel Laureate in Physics Sir Kostya Novoselov. She is the recipient of the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s award for outstanding research.
Nov. 14: Francesco Carota
“Across Worlds: Architectural Design and Research in the Age of Pluralism”
In an era marked by increasing cultural entanglements, global circulations and urgent socio-environmental challenges, architecture is compelled to rethink its epistemologies, methods and modes of engagement. This lecture explores how architectural design and research can embrace pluralism not only as a challenge to coherence, but as a generative condition for creative and critical practice. Drawing on projects and studies that span diverse scales, geographies and institutional contexts, the lecture will argue for an architecture that can operate across worlds: disciplinary boundaries, species, time frameworks and cultural realities. In this manner, the lecture will argue for a pluralistic ethos — an architecture that listens, adapts, and positions itself within broader struggles for environmental justice, spatial equity and epistemic diversity.
Carota is an assistant professor at the KU School of Architecture & Design and co-founder and CEO of the multidisciplinary design firm Calibro Zero. He also serves as an associate member at the KU Center for East Asian Studies and affiliate researcher at the China Room Research Group at Politecnico di Torino. A licensed architect and writer, his work has appeared in d+a, Domus, Vogue and many other publications. He is author of the books “China Goes Urban. The City to Come” (Skira 2021) and “New Silk Road: the Architecture of the Belt and Road Initiative” (Birkhauser 2025), the latter of which is currently featured at the 2025 Venice Biennale international architecture exhibition.
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KU provides fire, rescue and law enforcement training across Kansas.
https://ku.edu/distinction
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Contact: David Day, Office of Public Affairs, 785-864-0236, [email protected]
KU wins grant to increase Lawrence campus awareness of university values
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas won a nearly $700,000 grant to help raise awareness and extend the impact of KU’s IRISE Culture Charter for the Lawrence campus.
The IRISE Culture Charter was developed in 2023 to articulate five shared values — integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship and excellence — Jayhawks embody as members of the university community. A committee co-chaired by university governance and administration leaders developed the IRISE Culture Charter and values with input from KU community members.
The three-year, $699,287 grant, titled “Character Development at KU: The IRISE Virtues Initiative,” from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, will support KU’s efforts to bring greater awareness to the IRISE values, weave them into the fiber of the university culture and encourage KU community members to cultivate character within themselves. The grant follows a $46,040 capacity-building grant KU received last year from the Educating Character Initiative, titled, “KU IRISE: Values Adoption Initiative.”
“This latest grant will build on our initial work to develop a culture of character focused on the IRISE values as integral to the identity of being a Jayhawk,” said Nancy Snow, professor of philosophy and co-principal investigator on the grants.
During the 2024-25 academic year, Snow and Linda Luckey, assistant dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, led a group of IRISE Fellows on the Lawrence and Edwards campuses in exploring ways KU can more deeply embed the IRISE values in the university culture. The 12 faculty and staff IRISE Fellows were joined in that effort by a group of students and by the 2025 KU Staff Fellows cohort. The three groups met separately and collectively to ideate and plan ways to increase awareness of the IRISE values among students, faculty and staff. Those efforts culminated in the 2025 Staff Fellows Report, “IRISE for KU: Integrating IRISE Values into KU Culture.”
“We are committed to our vision to be an exceptional learning community that lifts each member and advances society,” said Barbara Bichelmeyer, chief academic officer/provost and executive vice chancellor. “Our vision is driven by shared values that guide our engagement with each other and foster care, support and a sense of belonging that is necessary to facilitate success for each member in the KU community. I’m thankful to the faculty, staff and students who have taken leadership on this initiative.”
Work under the new grant will focus on five main points of impact:
Ensure service-learning activities, student organizations and sorority and fraternity life include references to and instruction in the IRISE values.
Conduct a publicity campaign to raise awareness of IRISE values among all members of the university community.
Create 30 engaging and entertaining public-facing online course modules featuring the IRISE values.
Guide faculty to create or revise 30 courses that cultivate character in students.
Publish three articles and one edited special issue of a journal featuring KU’s IRISE work, as well as the work of others, in character development in higher education.
The three primary goals of the project are to raise awareness and instill the IRISE values and virtues into the fabric of the KU community, integrate character and values into the KU curriculum, and share findings from the work with colleagues at institutions around the world, said Kimberly Beets, co-PI on the project and research analyst in the Office of Analytics, Institutional Research & Effectiveness.
“We want to extend our insights and share our KU experiences with other researchers in a mutually beneficial exchange of strategies, plans and ideas,” Beets said. “We hope to continue ongoing collaborations with colleagues in the U.S. and abroad on the challenges and rewards of educating for character.”
The IRISE Culture Charter of shared university values aligns with the Educating Character Initiative’s focus on recognizing the importance of character education and integrating it into curricula and institutional cultures within higher education. Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character announced $15.6 million in grants to 33 institutions “to enable institutional leaders, faculty and staff to infuse character in undergraduate curricula and programming in ways that align organically with their mission, context and culture.”
The grant provides support for KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence Fellows who will work with instructors to integrate the IRISE values and character virtues into courses across a wide range of disciplines.
“The aim is not only to create new courses or completely redesign existing courses in various departments,” Snow said, “but also to ensure those courses continue to be taught in the future.”
The Educating Character Initiative received grant proposals from 170 institutions, according to Wake Forest University. Other grant recipients include Baylor University, Pepperdine University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, Villanova University and a collaboration among California State University-Bakersfield, Harvard University, DePauw University, Santa Fe College, Stanford University and St. Philip’s College.
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