Architecture Lecture Series
The Architecture Lecture Series welcomes architectural and experiential design leaders from around the country 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 Schedule
Fall 2025 lectures will take place in the John C. Gaunt Forum in Marvin Hall.
Kay Sargent
September 12, 4:30pm
Future-Casting: Where are we now and how is the workplace evolving?
For the past several years, companies have been focused on the challenges at hand - shifting work patterns, an increase in hybrid work and what that means to their portfolio and work habits. But the world continues to evolve and what was once in the distant future is now on the near horizon. We need to understand the key factors that will be influencing the places we work, play, learn and live. From AI to shifting social dynamics, from policies changes and economic considerations to environmental initiatives - change is afoot and we need to understand what that means for our future and the spaces we design.
Kay Sargent is a practicing, licensed and certified Interior Designer, Author, and Director of Thought Leadership, Interiors at HOK. With 40 years of experience, she has a passion for using design to transform how and where people work. Kay 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. Kay is author of “Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces” a book that addresses sensory processing, cognitive wellbeing and neurodiversity in the built environment and why and how we need to address it to create neuroinclusive spaces.
Emmanuel Vercruysse
October 31, 1:30pm
Prototyping Futures
In response to global environmental challenges, timber is emerging as a vital, renewable material for the future. By blending traditional material knowledge with advanced digital fabrication technologies, designers are discovering exciting new applications for timber. In this lecture, designer Emmanuel Vercruysse explores a vision of architecture where making—and remaking—is central to the act of design.
Emmanuel Vercruysse has a deep interest in the relationship between drawing and making. He approaches design as a series of translations between drawings and objects that oscillate between intuitive acts and precise operations. Combined with an in-depth knowledge of digital fabrication techniques, his approach employs the digital as an augmentation of the poetic capacity of the analogue. Vercruysse is co-director of the Design + Make program at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), which is headquartered at the AA’s Hooke Park campus, a forest laboratory for intense investigation and a home for architectural adventurers. Design + Make projects are shaped by curiosity, craft, and creativity, blending traditional material knowledge with advanced technologies such as 3D scanning, robotic fabrication, and CNC production.
Francesco Carota
November 14, 4:30pm | Livestream
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.
Francesco Carota, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design and cofounder and CEO of the multidisciplinary design firm Calibro Zero. He also serves as an associate member at the University of Kansas 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.