Dake Wells is a Missouri-based architecture firm with offices in Kansas City and Springfield. Its early commissions were K–12 schools and higher-education buildings, and it hasn’t looked back. Firm cofounders Brandon Dake and Andrew Wells met at a previous office more than 20 years ago; the pair decided to go out on their own in 2004. “We were both owners and minority owners in another firm, and we had signed a two-year noncompete contract. The K–12 and higher-ed market was something we could confidently get into without violating that contract,” Wells told AN. “So those were the first projects we went after, but we really started out doing anything we could get our hands on.” It worked: In 2023, the office was recognized with AN’s Best of Practice Award in the Architect (Medium Firm)—Midwest category. In 2018, architect Dan Maginn joined Dake Wells after a tenure in Kansas City running a separate office. Today, Wells and Dake oversee the Springfield office, while Maginn helms the Kansas City address. Maginn described the firm as “one office with two doors.” Wells implied that the distance subtly helps: “We’re only about two and a half hours apart, but we think about our practice as one thing that serves a broad geographic area,” a basket that includes the Ozarks, one of the most impoverished parts of the U.S. “We have a connection to rural projects,” Wells said. “Whether the context is urban, suburban, or rural, in every project we pay close attention to the community while trying to go above and beyond their expectations.” Jarrett Middle School (Gayle Babcock/Architectural Imageworks) Jarrett Middle School 2023 Matthew Thornton is a project architect at Dake Wells who has worked for the firm for well over a decade. Not long ago, Thornton was given the opportunity to embark on a project that “hit close to home,” as they say: He was the project lead for Jarrett Middle School, which his children currently attend. The project consolidated multiple smaller middle schools throughout Springfield into one location. It was built in a single-family suburban neighborhood, so the challenge was packing lots of program into a large volume without making something that stood out like a sore thumb. Architects at Dake Wells tucked the building into an existing hillside, taking advantage of the site’s natural topography. They also had fun with the facade, incorporating Jarrett Middle School’s mascot, a Trojan, into wall art that is visible from the street. Thornton said whenever he picks up his family from Jarrett Middle School, he checks out the fins that make up the facade, without trying to embarrass the kids. “Maybe in a few years they’ll think it’s cool that Dad designed their school,” Thornton said. “But for now they’re still in their ‘Dad’s embarrassing’ phase.” Innovation Lab at Missouri University of Science & Technology (Gayle Babcock/Architectural Imageworks) Innovation Lab 2024 The Missouri University of Science & Technology (S&T) is a top-notch regional institution that has graduated its fair share of astronauts: Sandra Magnus, Janet L. Kavandi, Thomas Akers, and other NASA scientists, to name a few. The University of Missouri satellite in Rolla, a city approximately midway between St. Louis and Springfield, caters to mostly rural agricultural students, and it recently earned Carnegie Classification®, meaning it’s one of the best research universities in the U.S. today. Missouri S&T now has a gleaming new research center designed by Dake Wells, Innovation Lab. The lab building is front and center in a new part of S&T, the Arrival District, meant to be the heart of the campus. Dake Wells designed a structure that stands out as an identifiable landmark. The facade bends and folds while incorporating materials that nod to the institution’s history; it’s meant to suggest a vertical projection map of a silver mine. “The institution began as a School of Mines, which was all about geology and metallurgy,” Wells said. “It also had one of the earliest ceramics programs, so materials like terra-cotta and brick became things we wanted to explore.” Autism and Neurodiversity Center (Courtesy Dake Wells Architecture) Autism and Neurodiversity Center 2025 The town of West Plains, Missouri, in Howell County, is a place where 23 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2022, more than double the recent national poverty rate of 11.1 percent. Dake Wells helped deliver a new center there that caters specifically to college students with autism and other neurodiverse individuals, while filling a specific need for the region. The Autism and Neurodiversity Center broke ground in 2023, and it completed construction early this year. The 9,300-square-foot facility is located on the Missouri State University–West Plains campus, approximately 100 miles east of Springfield. Its design focus is on the sensory environment. “This campus serves one of the poorest congressional districts in the country,” Wells said of MSU–West Plains. “It’s mostly commuter students from rural areas. The idea for this program was to provide for students that graduate from high school with autism a way for them to continue their education. There are just not many programs out there that do this sort of thing. It also offers a curriculum for those who want to be caregivers and educators for students with autism.” Judith Enyeart Reynolds Performing Arts Complex (Courtesy Dake Wells Architecture) Judith Enyeart Reynolds Performing Arts Complex 2022– One of Dake Wells’s many ongoing projects is the Judith Enyeart Reynolds Performing Arts Center, which entered construction last year at Missouri State University’s (MSU) main campus in Springfield. It sits on the campus’s southern edge, which is a major east-west thoroughfare. It replaces an existing building, Craig Hall, located between the football field and a retro Brutalist building from the 1970s. The office’s design for the center responds to these contextual signals by making an architectural statement. University officials have called it MSU’s new “front porch” for its Grand Street entryway. “The project, at least programmatically, is relatively simple,” Wells said. “It’s a new black box theater with a lobby, rehearsal spaces for dancing, acting, and performance, while also some smaller editing rooms, and other uses.” Keeping in line with the building’s performing arts usage, Dake Wells looked at the work of Bauhaus artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer, whose “slat dance” inspired so many 20th-century artists. “The building is this sort of abstraction,” Wells added, “which is ultimately about accentuating movement.”