Fostering Community Excellence 2023-2024 Activities

Learn how the School of Architecture & Design is working to advance a culture of respect, connection, and shared purpose at KU and in the communities we serve. 

Through institutional initiatives and community outreach, we are developing new opportunities to collaborate and engage.

Professor Sam Yates Meier with Hickman Mills Students. 

KU Design Camp + Pathways to Design | Summer 2024 

Sam Yates Meier facilitated the third installment of the collaboration between KU’s School of Architecture & Design and the Hickman Mills School District. Students participated in a personal branding workshop where they created and explored brands, logos, and graphic design. The week consisted of lectures and workshops and concluded with a brand presentation day, where participants shared their uniquely created responsive logo system and brand assets.

KU Design Camp 2024 

In June 2024, the School’s annual Design Camp provided a partial fee waiver to 9 high school students in the Kansas City and St. Louis metropolitan area school districts to attend the one-week camp and learn about architecture and design. The four students from the 20/20 Leadership Program in Kansas City came from Sumner Academy of Arts and Science, Washington High School, and Wyandotte High School. The two students from the Kansas City Kansas Public Schools District came from F.L. Schlagle High School and Sumner Academy of Arts and Science. The two students from the St. Louis area sponsored by Mackey Mitchell attend Parkway North High School and the STEAM Academy at McClure South Berkeley High School. The student from the Kansas City Missouri Public School District attends East High School.  

Campers stayed on campus for the week in Oswald Hall and dined in Mrs. E’s dining center. The week included campus tours, a keynote speaker (Kent Smith), academic spotlight presentations on Architecture, Illustration & Animation, Industrial Design, Interaction Design & Visual Communication Design, and Interior Architecture. The campers stayed busy in the evening with a risograph workshop (Lizzy Arnold) and visits to the Spencer Museum of Art on campus and Sylas & Maddy’s Ice Cream on Massachusetts Street.

Campers chose a morning and afternoon academic workshop to attend during the week. The morning workshops topics included Architectural Design Utilizing Digital Fabrication Tools (Amy Van de Riet), Jayhawk Boulevard: Present and Future (Marianne Remboldt), and Brand You (Sam Meier). The afternoon workshop topics included Architecture: A Spatial Journey (Anne Patterson), Creating Concept, Character, and Creatures (Kent Smith), and Web Design for Beginners (Titus Smith).

On the last day, students presented their workshop projects to their families, guests, and teachers, and received certificates of participation at the closing program. The camp was coordinated by School staff members Anna Abernathy and April Czarnetzki and current KU Architecture & Design students Emma Curran, Ava Gaddie, Kaitlyn Jolly, Lexi Leibengood, and Cash Shellhorn served as resident assistants for the campers. 

NOMA-KC Pipeline Project Architecture Summer camp final showcase.

NOMA-KC Pipeline Project Architecture Summer Camp | Summer 2024

The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) Kansas City Chapter annually holds an architecture summer camp for middle and high school students of underrepresented populations in the Kansas City area to introduce students of minority backgrounds to the profession of architecture and to encourage them to choose architecture as their career path. Two architecture faculty members of the school, Mohammad Dastmalchi and Amy Van de Riet, collaborated with NOMA-KC to develop and deliver the curriculum for this 3-day long summer camp in July 2024. Twenty-three middle and high school students of minority backgrounds participated in the camp. In the morning of the first day, Mohammad and Amy helped lead a session in which students were instructed in diagraming and understanding how to represent their three-dimensional surroundings into two-dimensional drawings. Mohammad introduced the concept of the “Empathy Map” to help students understand how architects/designers need to think to design a space. In the afternoon, Mohammad and Amy went with students on a site visit to explore an outdoor space on the UMKC campus. Back in the classroom, they led students in a diagramming exercise to help them use their mental mapping to draw a site plan of the outdoor space. On the second day, students continued to learn about urban analysis through Kevin Lynch’s elements of city image, different definitions and terminology in urban planning activities, learning about the elements and principles of architecture, playing games in which, they learned about building's relationships within an urban block, developing skills in orthographic drawings, scale, bubble diagrams, and the design thinking process. In the morning of the final day, students finalized their designs and built physical models, following the guidelines provided by NOMA-KC. In the afternoon, parents and family members came to see their children's work and presentation. The KU faculty members were sponsored with summer stipends from the school.