See how UK plans to transform 100-year-old Reynolds building into modern College of Design

The University of Kentucky offered a glimpse at the coming transformation of a defunct, 145,000-square-foot former tobacco warehouse into the modernized home for the university’s College of Design.

The large volume of space within the the vast century-old Reynold’s Building on Scott Street gave room for ample opportunity to create a natural-light-filled new educational building that is designed to promote creative crossover between multiple disciplines within the university’s design college.

The design was formulated by prominent international architecture and design practice, Studio Gang, in conjunction with the Louisville-based Architect of Record K. Norman Berry Associates. Student designs for furniture and other parts of the building will round out the space.

The Reynolds Building was built in 1917. UK acquired the space and moved the university’s art department there in the 1960s. In need of major renovations, the building was vacated less than a decade ago, as UK’s School of Art and Visual Studies moved into a nearby renovated building on Bolivar Street. Since College of Design Dean Mitzi Vernon arrived in 2015, she said the college has been proactive about trying to save and preserve the Reynolds Building.

From the beginning, the building has been scheduled to reopen in fall 2022, but there are no guarantees, Vernon said. The full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the construction timeline still remains to be seen. The full project budget is $38.6 million. Once completed, the Reynolds Building will serve as the unified home for a college that has long been segmented into separate buildings on UK’s sprawling campus, Vernon said.

“We are in four buildings that are relatively small compared to the Reynolds building,” Vernon said. “And so that’s just prohibitive. It not only causes a problem with everybody knowing each other and seeing each other and learning from each other, it also causes cultural rifts between the programs, and I’ve been trying to heal that.”

The idea of unifying a college and its many different disciplines beneath one roof is carried through the building’s “polycultural” design, said Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang’s founder and leader whose architecture work has included the 82-story Aqua Tower in Chicago and is leading a team designing a new Global Terminal at O’Hare International Airport.

“The building itself kind of was for a single purpose originally,” Gang said. “But what is coming to it is this really rich, diverse, set of uses and programs all coming together.”

Outside the building’s main entrance will be new trees and an environmental canopy that will provide shade over an outdoor “fabrication dock” where larger student designs and creations can be displayed, Vernon said. The main entrance will be essentially a glass front surrounded by the building’s brick exterior with a cafe just inside the front doors. UK design students will be meeting this semester to create the cafe’s shell and the cabinetry and mill work that will be in the reception area.

Timber columns throughout the building help to demarcate studio spaces and much of those studio spaces will be just across the hall from a maker’s space where project prototypes, models and mock ups can be developed.

First-year students in the college from a variety of disciplines — architecture, landscape architecture, interior and product design — will have common studio areas and will have equal access to the maker’s space, Vernon said. Student-designed desks will also be in the studios and will make for a philanthropic opportunity for the college as a desk can be donated with the donor’s name inscribed in the desk’s steel frame.

The design of the building, which will also include a multi-story lecture hall, was intentional about having “no silos” between disciplines, Gang said.

This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 1:44 PM with the headline "See how UK plans to transform 100-year-old Reynolds building into modern College of Design."

Rick Childress

Lexington Herald-Leader

502-219-6483

Rick Childress covers Eastern Kentucky for the Herald-Leader. The Lexington native and University of Kentucky graduate first joined the paper in 2016 as an agate desk clerk in the sports section and in 2020 covered higher education during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He spent much of 2021 covering news and sports for the Klamath Falls Herald and News in rural southern Oregon before returning to Kentucky in 2022.