Contract has published University of Utah’s Lassonde Studios in its new education issue. The breakthrough entrepreneurial education building stacks four residential floors atop a 20,000 sf startup garage where students live, learn and launch companies. In just two years, the building has more than quadrupled the number of student startups on campus. The full article can be read online.

 

“Lassonde needed a physical home base that would unify its participants, who hailed from different majors ranging from business to fine arts, under one room to spur productivity and innovation,” the story reads. “As this called for more than a conventional academic building or residence hall, the program and campus housing staffs embarked on a collaboration with CannonDesign and its Yazdani Studio on what would become their own prototype of sorts…

 

We had to invent a new typology that, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t exist on other campuses,” said Mehrdad Yazdani, director of the Yazdani Studio of CannonDesign and design principal for the project. The team concluded that creativity and innovation could flourish in an environment that blurred the lines of “where I sleep, where I make, and where I meet” added Yazdani. Thus, the five-story Lassonde Studios – a combination school (residence hall) and startup incubator – was born.”