LSU plans for $107 million Construction and Advanced Manufacturing Building

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - LSU is planning to build a new Construction and Advanced Manufacturing Building right across from Tiger Stadium. The new $107 million facility will have state-of-the-art classrooms and equipment. Vicki Colvin is the Dean of LSU’s College of Engineering. She says the construction industry is expected to grow 15% each year by 2030. Colvin says construction is a vital part of Louisiana’s future.

“Construction touches a lot of different industries, ranging from oil and gas to actually now data centers and artificial intelligence. So all of those communities need us to have a strong and growing construction industry, and that’s what this building is going to help us do,” Colvin says. “It’s going to build the houses we need. It also builds all the factories we see along the Mississippi, and in the next couple of years, it’s going to build even more at our coastline to really help us just increase the economy and serve the American people.”

Colvin says they also have big plans for the laboratories that will welcome the next generation of technology and change the way buildings are constructed.

“Whether it’s protecting the construction worker, leading to safer construction sites, lowering the cost of housing, all of those things are going to be made possible through the technologies that our LSU faculty develop and then test in partnership with our industry,” Colvin says.

Colvin says the hope is to raise $75 million by 2026. So far, with the help of their latest donation from LSU construction and management alumni Art Favre of $15 million, and other various donations - they have raised $37 million total.

The hope is for construction to begin in the summer of 2026.

Click here to report a typo. Please include the headline.

Click here to subscribe to our WAFB 9 News daily digest and breaking news alerts delivered straight to your email inbox.