Spaces & Resources
Our college provides a range of resources that foster experiential learning and collaboration, offering students and faculty the tools and spaces to explore, create, and innovate together.
A+A Building
Our award-winning building, affectionately called “the A+A,” houses administrative and faculty offices for the College of Architecture and Design, as well as 450+ individual student workstations in open studio spaces. The building also features an auditorium and lecture halls, a woodshop and fabrication space, a gallery, exhibition and review spaces and an amazing atrium flooded with natural light and open to the ceiling four floors above.
Bruce McCarty, founder of local design firm, McCarty Holsaple McCarty Architects and Interior Designers, along with his son, Doug McCarty (’73), constructed the A+A as part of a design competition. It is more than 160,000 square feet, and the atrium, which runs the full length of the building, is about 360 feet long.
Fab Lab
Contributing to downtown Knoxville’s urban renewal, our Fab Lab is a 20,000-square-foot maker studio in a renovated historic building; though, there’s nothing old about the Fab Lab.
Our makerspace, equipped with a large robotic workcell, CNC routers, CNC metal, waterjet & laser cutting and 3D printers, offers students fabrication tools that elevate their design education.
Through rapid prototyping, students’ designs move from flat computer screens to models in their hands, not over days, but in mere hours. Two levels of fabrication resources allow students to create with many substrates, from wood to plastics and from titanium to ceramics. This is an experience they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Woodshop
We offer two wood fabrication studios as resources to our students; one located in the A+A and one in the Fab Lab. Here, you can use a variety of stationary, hand, and power tools to experiment with design and materials, fabricate models, build furniture and more.
The A+A’s shop is about 3,600 square feet and equipped with a Thermwood 3-axis CNC router, a horizontal panel and sawstop table saw, helix planer, and more available to all students. In the Fab Lab woodshop, students have access to CNC routers, many fixed, electric, and pneumatic power tools, and much more.
From these incredible resources, you learn skills you can’t learn anywhere else, which prepares you for your career and supports your design passion.
Digital Futures Lab
The Digital Futures Lab, or DFL, is a studio space designed to facilitate research, experimentation, and project development in emerging digital technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality. In addition to immersive technologies, the lab features a fully equipped video studio, making it an ideal space for recording a wide range of content, from lectures and presentations to demos, vlogs, and podcasts.
Digital Print Center
Our self-service print system is maintained and operational 24/7; both large-format plotters and small-format printers are available for use. Only PDF files are supported by our self-service system. In addition, there are two color and seven black-and-white laser printers distributed throughout the studios and the Fab Lab. College members can find 4 laser cutting machines and dozens of cloud-operated 3D printers within the DPC.
Need help Printing?
Come by the Digital Print Center, and our staff can help answer all of your printing questions. They can also assist with the laser cutter and 3D printer usage as well.