Downtown Muncie Studio Connects Ball State Design Students With Community
A temporary downtown studio in Muncie’s historic Columbia Theater Building gives Ball State architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning students hands-on experience with community-focused projects.
Opportunities for community engagement and collaboration can arise in unexpected places. For Ball State University’s Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning (ECAP), one of those places is the first floor of a historic downtown Muncie theater.
When the University’s Architecture Building began a major renovation in May 2025—work that will continue through December 2026—ECAP needed an alternate studio space for some of its architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning undergraduate and graduate students. The college secured nearly 5,000 square feet on the first floor of the historic Columbia Theater Building at 306 S. Walnut St. in Muncie.
The space is a dynamic hub for student learning and for community events, collaborations, and joint initiatives.
As of mid-October 2025, ECAP had 44 students learning and working in the hub. Those students have been actively engaged in local design and planning projects that will help Muncie and East Central Indiana evolve, ECAP Dean David Ferguson, ’78, said.
The downtown studio has given students such as Daniel Van Dyke a new perspective on their work.
“This studio allows my classmates and me to see that planning isn’t just theory; it’s about real spaces with real challenges,” Mr. Van Dyke said. “I am grateful for the hands-on experience that this program and this downtown studio have given me.”
Other ECAP students have been attending classes at various sites on campus during the renovation period, with a long-term goal of bringing more of the college’s students into the downtown space over time.
The Columbia Theater hub includes flexible studio zones, a gallery and event venue, the Center for Historic Preservation, a planning library, and a new GIS-driven Urban Planning Discovery Center. ECAP also hosts community outreach activities there in partnership with Ball State’s College of Health.
Read more about the new hub
Students collab with ecoREHAB on Muncie housing
Recently, students in Ball State’s Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning (ECAP) partnered with ecoREHAB, a Muncie nonprofit, on infill housing plans for the city’s historic Old West End neighborhood. Neighborhood-planning studio courses in the Department of Urban Planning gathered data, engaged residents, and developed block-level strategies to guide future development, and undergraduate fourth-year architecture students designed infill housing proposals.
ECAP also played a leading role in creating the community-based housing strategy that helped Muncie secure $6.75 million in READI 2.0 state funding to revitalize downtown and the Old West End. The funding will support construction of a four-story, 54-unit apartment building across from City Hall and 34 additional homes in the Old West End, including 30 new single-family houses and four rehabilitated historic properties. ECAP students and faculty will work with ecoREHAB on the construction of one of these houses.
