If Peter Pran lives a double life, he does it by design.

Pran is a full-time professor of architecture at Kansas University. But he’s also an internationally known architect receiving increasing publicity for his unusual buildings.

“The university comes first, but I do think me working on projects gives students an extra dimension on architecture,” he said. “I have a pulse on what’s happening. I can communicate that with students.”

Pran’s lifestyle requires frequent travel between KU, his firm NBBJ’s offices in New York, London, Seattle and Columbus, Ohio, and project sites around the world.

Last week, for example, he taught classes at KU on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday, he was in New York City, working on design projects.

Though he said that’s a busier-than-usual travel week, the 67-year-old architect said he had logged more than 100,000 airline miles each of the past five years.

“He’s an energetic guy, and he gets things done,” said John Gaunt, dean of KU’s school of architecture and urban design. “And travel requires a lot of energy these days.”

‘Big victory’

Pran has been receiving a lot of press in architectural magazines lately for a project recently completed in his native Norway.

Peter Pran, a KU architecture professor, has been getting a lot of attention for his designs, including the Telenor world headquarters in Oslo, Norway, pictured behind Pran. The model at left is a tower Pran is working on to be located in Singapore.

Pran was lead designer for the world headquarters of Telenor, a communications company based in Oslo. NBBJ worked with a pair of Norwegian firms on a 2.25 million-square-foot, $600 million facility that has been described as the “office of the future.”

The building is home to 7,000 workers, but includes little traditional office space. Instead, employees have cell phones and laptop computers and work in shared workspace throughout the building. Even “snail mail” is scanned and e-mailed to employees.

“It’s a paperless office,” Pran said. “All the information is digital. It’s 100 percent office space, and a truly democratic office. The junior person and the senior executives have more or less the same office space.”

The building was the subject of articles in “Architectural Record” and “Metropolis” magazines earlier this year.

“The No. 1 benefit is the access to knowledge, the access to other people, the possibilities that these buildings offer for informal discussion,” Jon Fredrik Baksaas, Telenor’s CEO, told “Metropolis.” “In the atriums, in the meeting areas, I can constantly see that people are teaming up in small, informal groups.”

The Telenor building apparently has opened the door to other Norwegian projects. Pran is working on a soccer stadium in Norway and another office building in Oslo, in addition to an office building in Singapore.

¢ Telenor Headquarters¢ Metropolis magazine’s article on Telenor Fornebu

“It’s the only building I’ve designed for my home country that’s been finished, so I’m pretty proud of it,” Pran said of the Telenor complex. “It was unbelievable. It was a big victory.”

Curvy designs

Telenor’s design, with curved lines throughout the building, is typical of Pran’s work.

Kansas University architecture professor Peter Pran was the lead designer for the Telenor world headquarters in Oslo, Norway. Pran works at the NBBJ architecture firm in addition to teaching at KU.

“Most architects tend to become softer and more permissive as they age, but Peter Pran’s radical attitude seems to toughen with time,” fellow architect Juhani Pallasmaa wrote of Pran’s work in a 1998 book. “Whereas early modernist buildings aspired to a weightless horizontal flow, Peter Pran conceives curved and warped movements that fuse horizontally with vertically, and rectangularity with curved geometries.”

Another recent Pran project also showed use of those “warped” designs. It is the headquarters for Vulcan, a company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, in Seattle. One side of the building, he said, leans away from the Union Station train depot to show respect to the historic structure next door. Another side leans toward the Seattle Seahawks stadium nearby.

“It stands out, but it also fits in,” Pran said. “It has both feelings.”

Other projects

Other buildings Pran has designed or helped design include the Jeddah International Airport in Saudi Arabia; the Chicago Federal Center; the Deloitte and Touche accounting firm’s headquarters in Wilton, Conn.; the New York Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan; and a terminal at the airport in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Pran received his architecture training at Oslo Arkitekhogskole University before coming to the United States and working for a firm in Chicago.

The Vulcan headquarters in Seattle was designed to have one wall leaning away from the Union Station depot, and another leaning toward the Seattle Seahawks stadium.

There, he was involved in the early schematic drawings for the Sears Tower. He said preliminary drawings showed two smaller towers, instead of the 110-story building that now stands out in the Chicago skyline.

“Nobody knew it was going to be the tallest building in the world,” he said. “Nobody had any idea.”

He also has taught at the University of Illinois and at universities in Japan, Italy and Denmark. He began teaching at KU in 1997, after being lured by Gaunt, the architecture dean who worked with him previously at an architecture firm.

‘Dramatic forms’

Gaunt said through much of his career, Pran was ahead of his time. Only recently have clients started using many of his unique designs, he said.

“So much throughout the ’80s and ’90s, his work remained on paper,” Gaunt said. “In the mid-’90s, the means developed to have these buildings built. He needed the times.”

Gaunt said convincing clients to use nontraditional building forms took work.

“He has a natural inclination to dramatic forms,” he said. “He’s a sculptor in architectural terms.”

Ana Paz, a graduate student in architecture, said Pran’s history of unique buildings made him a better professor.

“He has a gift,” Paz said. “I think we are extremely fortunate to have him. He’s so world-renowned. So many people look up to him. It’s fortunate. Some of the students don’t know how important he is, how famous he is.”

Pran said he plans to continue splitting time between academia and the real world. But he said he’d eventually like to scale back his architecture work to spend more time in the classroom.

“I’m totally dedicated to teaching,” he said. “It’s an ideal situation to do this full-time and also continue my work.”