Stouffer Place Apartments, opened in fall 2018 as part of the Central District development, comprises two buildings designed by Treanor Architects of Lawrence. The former Stouffer Place apartment buildings were razed in 2016. 

The university-owned apartment complex has 708 beds and features either two-bedroom/two-bath or four-bedroom/four-bath suites, full kitchen with dishwasher, and laundry facilities in each unit. Its budget was $58 million.

Opened in fall 1951, the hall houses men in two-person suites. Designed by Raymond Coolidge, it was partly funded by Mrs. Lyle Stephenson in memory of her husband, a Kansas City insurance salesman and amateur entomologist. It was built on the eastern edge of the Brynwood estate property obtained from Acacia fraternity by Olin Templin in 1939.

The building houses the William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications; administrative and faculty offices; classrooms; the Bremner Editing Center; the Kansas Scholastic Press Association; the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism; the Kansas Journalism Institute, and the William Allen White Foundation.

KU Center for Research Inc. purchased this 11,700-square-foot building, west of Bob Billings Parkway and Kasold Drive, in 2013 to house the School of Education’s Center for Public Partnerships & Research.

That center is part of the Achievement & Assessment Institute, founded in 2012 to build partnerships and programs that support the success of young children, school-aged children, adults, and publicly funded agencies. Its four research centers also support research and job-training opportunities for KU students.

PKG Design Group of Lawrence designed this 34,000-square-foot building in 1980 as the corporate headquarters for Maupintour Inc., an international travel agency. The university purchased it for $3.2 million in 1998 to consolidate its continuing education programs and offices.

In 2014, after the continuing education programs moved to the Edwards Campus, it was renamed. It now houses the Achievement and Assessment Institute.

The apartment building was funded by a bequest from Elizabeth Cade Sprague (1874-1960), head of the home economics department 1914-41, in memory of her sister Amelia, an artist and designer. Retired faculty members live in the 10 units of the redbrick building, completed in 1960.

The university’s first library, this Oread limestone and red sandstone building was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by Kansas City architect Henry van Brunt, who also designed the first chancellor’s residence immediately east of it.

Both were funded by an 1891 bequest of Boston leather merchant and philanthropist William B. Spooner, uncle of Francis H. Snow, an original faculty member and the fifth chancellor. Dedicated in October 1894, it was the library until 1924, when the much larger Watson Library opened.

This neoclassical building, which opened in 1968, honors Kenneth A. Spencer (1902-60), a 1926 graduate who founded the Spencer Chemical Co. and the Midwest Research Institute of Kansas City, MO.

The library was built with a grant from his widow, Helen Foresman Spencer, who attended KU, and the family foundation.

The museum, dedicated in September 1977, was built with funds from the Kenneth A. and Helen F. Spencer Foundation. It is named for Helen Foresman Spencer, a student in the 1920s who married Kenneth A. Spencer, a 1926 graduate who founded a chemical company and the Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City, MO.

Like the Spencer Research Library, which she also funded, the museum was designed by architect Robert Jenks of Kansas City, a KU classmate of the Spencers, and built of white Indiana limestone.

The yellow-brick library, designed by Gould Evans Associates of Lawrence, was begun in 1984 and dedicated May 5, 1988.

It is named for Charles E. Spahr, a 1934 engineering alumnus, emeritus chair and CEO of Standard Oil Co. of Ohio and a KU benefactor who with his wife made a major endowment to the library.