Designed to handle bigger classes of medical students, the Wichita Biomedical Campus will do it in style and comfort, too.

The building under construction downtown will feature a student lounge and outdoor terrace on the seventh floor, multiple spaces of varying size for study and collaboration and an inviting, sophisticated color scheme.

“The interior is going to be fantastic,” said Heather van Buuren, director of Academic & Student Affairs.

Students will enter the campus, located at Broadway and William streets, from entrances on the east and west side, then grab an elevator to their destination. KU School of Medicine-Wichita and KU School of Pharmacy-Wichita will occupy floors six through eight, while Wichita State University and WSU Tech use floors one through four. Five is shared between the schools.

The sixth floor holds two lecture halls with capacity for 80 persons each. They will accommodate first- and second-year students as those classes grow from about 28 students each at present to 70.

“Each will have their own large classroom for lectures,” van Buuren said. “They’ll double as test centers when they take their exams, which is kind of nice.”

The lecture rooms can be combined into one space for banquets and other large events. The sixth floor also contains four 40-person classrooms and a 30-person classroom, all equipped for distance learning.

Floors seven and eight will each contain 10 home rooms designed for seven medical students each.

“It’s their own personal space,” van Buuren said. “It’s where they do their PBLs (problem-based learning) and CBCLs (case-based collaborative learning).”

Lectures are typically delivered remotely from the Kansas City campus of KU School of Medicine while Wichita faculty work with first- and second-year students in their home rooms.

Ally Turner, assistant director of academic affairs, said distance learning technology similar to that currently used by the school will be utilized in the large lecture halls. The homerooms will allow quick hookups of computers to a large screen TV or wirelessly through Air Media.

“We tried to make it very flexible in how it can be used,” Turner said.

The seventh floor will hold the Academic & Student Affairs office and other administrative offices, plus space for student interest groups.

“We have a lot of student interest groups and they’ll have their own designated room where they can have meetings and collaborate, and a specific area where they can store their materials,” Turner said. “That’s new."

Floors six through eight also contain multiple study and collaboration areas designed for one to four people. The eighth-floor medical school library, for instance, will have individual study areas along its windows. “So they’re going to have a full view of the city,” van Buuren said.

The Dean’s Office will also sit on the eighth floor.

If students get hungry, they will be able to grab something to eat at a snack shop on the ground floor — or fix something themselves in a kitchenette in the seventh-floor student center. The student center seems destined to become popular, offering a big screen TV, pool table and outdoor terrace with its own view of the city. “What’s really neat about this building is they’re going to have an outdoor space, which is something we don’t have here" on the current campus, van Buuren said.

One challenge facing the building’s planners was its color scheme: How would it serve three different institutions of higher learning without favoring one.

“What we tried to avoid was to do just yellow and black for WSU and red and blue for KU,” van Buuren said. “The designers took a lot of different shades of reds and blues and interspersed a lot of white, black and also neutral colors like gray and tan to kind of even everything out. The colors flow between the floors. They worked their magic.”

Turner agreed, calling the result “modern, yet comfortable.”

Learn More

Go to the Wichita Biomedical Campus page to learn more about the new home for health sciences taking shape in downtown Wichita.