Plans for the largest single University construction project to date are officially under way, with the entire process scheduled to finish within four years, Dean Bruce Lindsey announced in a discussion about the new Sam Fox architecture building on Monday.

Student Life reported in November that preliminary plans were in place to add an 80,000-square-foot building to the Givens Hall parking lot to help house the graduate program of art and architecture.

Though all of the necessary funds have not yet been raised for the entire project, the plan’s two-year phase of building design has begun with the architect selection process.

A selection committee that includes members appointed by the chancellor, board members and faculty has picked three potential firms and narrowed down 23 proposals to six. The firm’s teams will present to students the week of March 23, and an architect will be selected that week.

Megan Berry, the president of the Graduate Architecture Council, will be working with the faculty to collect student responses from the teams’ presentations. She noted that she is optimistic about Lindsey’s cooperation with student wishes and requests.

According to Lindsey, Washington University consulted with the planning and design firm Ayers Saint Gross five or six years ago about a preliminary version of the project. The group worked with the Sam Fox School to develop a study about the growth of its graduate programs, with a new building in mind.

“It’s the largest single project the University has ever done,” Lindsey said.

Weil Hall, the planned building in the Givens lot, is meant to accommodate the growth that has taken place in the past several years in the graduate programs as well as to enable graduate art students to stay on campus rather than work off campus in the Lewis Center.

Lindsey explained his vision of Weil Hall as a space that will promote both the field of architecture and collaboration.

“It needs to allow for the work that goes on here to be public, to be seen,” Lindsey said. “The building needs to welcome in the other members of the University—we want the building to promote collaborative research and not only between art and architecture and between architecture and other fields. And we want it to provide a kind of coalescing of the school’s identity as a single school but emphasize too the individual program identities.”

The innovations will include more social spaces, studio spaces, increased sustainability and a focus on landscaping, which Lindsey says will bring the collection of buildings into a stronger dialogue and connection with each other.

The plan for the new architecture building was created with considerations for the master plan for landscape architecture for the Lower Danforth Campus, which the University is currently expanding, as well as a new building for a material engineering program.