KU architecture students showcase work at Kansas City design week

More than 100 University of Kansas architecture and design students put their work in front of a regional audience Friday night at MMTH Creative Studio in Kansas City’s Crossroads district, turning a design-week event into a public test of how far Lawrence talent can travel.

The KU Student Showcase ran from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at 103 W. 19th St. and featured twenty-two 12-foot-tall posters, video displays, digitally fabricated objects, furniture and printed work. KU said the exhibition pulled from recent student projects in animation, architecture, illustration, industrial design, interaction design, interior architecture, photography and visual communication design.

For the School of Architecture & Design, the point was bigger than a one-night display. Dan Rolf, the director of the Hatch Resource Center and communications for the school, said he and professor and associate dean Jae D. Chang wanted a way to show the energy and creative drive of KU students to a broader audience. That broader audience is not just Kansas City’s design crowd. It is also the regional architecture, interiors, urban design and creative business network that can turn classroom work into internships, collaborations and jobs.

That matters in Lawrence because KU remains one of the city’s largest institutions and one of its clearest talent pipelines. When students present polished work in a metropolitan setting, they are also advertising the strength of the university’s training back home. KU’s two departments, architecture and design, house seven programs: architecture, interior architecture, industrial design, interaction design, animation, illustration and visual communication design.

The showcase landed inside KC Design Week 2026, which ran April 22 through 30 and included 19 experiences, nine of them free. Organizers say the annual festival has existed since 2010 and is produced by seven professional design organizations through the Center for Architecture & Design. For KU, participation places students in the middle of a long-running regional conversation about how design shapes cities, workplaces and public life.

KU also used the event to point ahead to another exhibition, an interdisciplinary sports design project centered on the World Cup, set for May 6 through Aug. 21 at Keystone CoLAB. The school has used KC Design Week before, including a 2015 pair of exhibitions that ranged from the MoCoLab, a restored Airstream trailer used as a mobile community center, to Emerging Economies: KC Makers and the Creative Class, focused on the Linwood Midtown neighborhood and local maker spaces.

That continuity shows a larger strategy. KU is not just sending students to Kansas City for exposure. It is using that exposure to strengthen the case that Lawrence design education can help power the region’s creative economy and keep more graduates connected to the area.