Update: Director of Strategic Communications Lainie Mazzullo-Hart, members of the Allen House and the Friends of Corbin have since told The Sunflower that Wichita State does not have any current plans to turn the Corbin Education Center into a museum. The Friends of Corbin, an organization dedicated to supporting the preservation of the Corbin Education Center, is interested in preserving the building.

The Corbin Education Center, which houses Wichita State’s College of Education, will now be offering tours through the Allen House Foundation — a charity that conserves architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Wichita — once a month through August.

These tours began in March and are intended to generate funding that will go toward the Allen House Foundation and the Friends of Corbin. On April 18, the second tour of the Corbin Education Center was given. 

“I had a lot of people that were interested,” tour guide DJ Spaeth said about the April 18 tour. “… It’s in the growing stages of a tour. This group’s really helpful to me, for what I need to add to personalize this tour or what the consumer wants, and that’s always really good.”

Wright designed the Corbin Education Center in 1957, and the construction was finished in 1964. The building currently houses administrative suites and classrooms for the College of Education. 

“I think this is good for awareness for people to realize that maybe down the road this place is going to be more of a museum and just more open to the public,” Melinda Schnyder, a guest on the tour, said. “I think it was a really good overview just to tease you and get you interested in it.”

Schnyder said she has been on multiple tours of buildings designed by Wright across the country and that this one interested her because she often drives by and had wanted to see the inside.

“I really like hearing the background about what was happening in Wichita and what was happening at Wichita State the time it was built, that really helps set the tone,” Schnyder said. 

Originally, there were supposed to be two buildings, the Corbin Education Center and a laboratory school. The laboratory school was never built because the funding of $1.6 million was not approved. Instead, parking lots were put in, according to Spaeth. The Corbin Education Center cost $960,000.

“The Kansas (Board of) Regents were not going to approve Frank Lloyd Wright architecture for this campus, so they hurried up and accelerated the building of this (Corbin),” Spaeth said. 

The Kansas Board of Regents is the governing board for higher education in Kansas, overseeing public colleges and universities including Wichita State. 

Spaeth also co-teaches classes in the Corbin Education Center and said that she believes the building does not accommodate the needs of the students or faculty.  

“It’s not functional,” Spaeth said. “It would’ve been functional had they built the second building… because this (Corbin) would’ve been for collaborational meetings, not for instructing.”