University of New Haven – Riyadh Unveils Innovative Design for its College of Business and Digital Innovation

The University of New Haven – Riyadh (NHU-Riyadh) has unveiled the design of its first college, the College of Business and Digital Innovation, opening this autumn at Mohammed Bin Salman Nonprofit City (Misk City) in Riyadh. The design is created by Kampus, a U.K. studio specialising in evidence-led educational design.

The campus is a new kind of college, designed for a new kind of education. Classrooms, study spaces and shared areas are designed around how students learn, drawing on Kampus’ evidence-led approach to acoustic comfort, lighting, sightlines, materials and inclusive design. The result is a campus shaped as much by how students will study as by what they will study.

Kampus have developed evidence-led design standards for educational environments, creating measurable benchmarks for acoustic comfort, lighting, sightlines and inclusion that go beyond conventional building requirements. The studio designs every project alongside acoustic and lighting specialists and applies inclusive-design principles across all of its work. At NHU-Riyadh, those standards have been applied to the demands of a college teaching the next generation of Saudi talent.

“We set out to build a new kind of college for a new kind of education,” said Jens Frederiksen, Ph.D., President of the University of New Haven. “That meant being as deliberate and strategic about where our students will learn as about what they will learn. Kampus brings to NHU-Riyadh a discipline of evidence-led learning-space design, and our students will feel the difference from day one.”

“Experiential learning is the hallmark of a University of New Haven education,” said Leo Lester, Ph.D., senior vice president for NHU-Riyadh. “Our students collaborate, build, present and work with industry, and the spaces they learn in should be built for immersive educational experiences, not for listening to lectures. Kampus has designed a college that embraces the way we actually teach.”

NHU-Riyadh opens this autumn at Misk City with the College of Business and Digital Innovation, the first of three colleges planned in Riyadh. It is the first international branch campus of an American university to operate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

About Kampus

Kampus is a UK studio specialising in educational environments worldwide. Headquartered in Manchester, the practice brings together world-class education architects, brand experience designers, academic professionals and school equipment consultants, with over 100 institutions, thousands of educational interiors and 25 million sqm of campus experience behind them. Its clients span prestigious educational institutions across the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and include major education groups such as Cognita, GEMS, Nexus, Dwight and Nord Anglia. Kampus also works with special educational needs schools in KSA, including Beech Hall in Riyadh and Royat Al-Ebitkar International School in Jeddah. The practice is currently on site in Cairo, Brussels, London and KSA. Unlike traditional practices that design the building first and worry about the inside later, Kampus works from the inside out. That means starting deep inside the organisation: the values, the pedagogy, the heritage and the competitive position, then creating a campus that brings all of it to life, from arrival to departure. The result is an institution that works brilliantly, looks different and builds commercial advantage from day one.