By HFT Staff

KAI celebrated the recent opening of the Nursing and Health Sciences Center at St. Louis Community College (STLCC) at Florissant Valley in Ferguson, Missouri. The $62.9 million facility will address the immediate job training demands of St. Louis’ area hospitals and healthcare systems. 

Built to LEED Certified standards, the four-story Center is designed to be the front door to the campus with its large windows, exterior wood elements and prominent location adjacent to I-270. Indoor and outdoor student gathering spaces and state-of-the-art learning facilities come together to create a building that is both modern and welcoming to its end users. 

KAI served as the architect and MEP/FP engineer on the more than 100,000-square-foot building. PARIC was the general contractor and NAVIGATE Building Solutions was the construction manager on the project, which broke ground in July 2023. The Center welcomed its first students in January 2025, and an official ribbon cutting celebrating the building’s opening was held on February 27.  

The Center will house STLCC’s first-ever bachelor’s degree program in respiratory care, increase student capacity for the nursing program and bring several new programs to the Florissant Valley campus such as dental hygiene, radiologic technology and paramedic technology. Other programs will include behavioral health support, deaf communication studies, patient care technician and medical assistant. An on-site dental hygiene clinic will offer free and low-cost services to the community. 

Other features of the building’s design include hallway windows that provide views into labs for accessible tours and program visibility; gathering and study spaces such as lounges, study rooms and multipurpose rooms; and science labs for anatomy and physiology courses, completing a self-sustaining health sciences hub. 

Evolving industries, technological advances, and growing nursing and health science programs prompted the college to expand and modernize its facilities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the Registered Nursing (RN) workforce will expand by 6 percent over the next decade. 

In 2019, STLCC completed a new Nursing and Health Sciences Center, also designed by KAI, at its Forest Park campus. The facility was the campus’s first new building in over 20 years. The four-level, 96,000-square-foot learning center sits along Oakland Avenue and was designed to achieve a LEED v4 Silver certification.