Texas A&M-Fort Worth Research and Innovation Building A

The Texas A&M System opened its first downtown Fort Worth academic building on the morning of 5 August 2026 and broke ground on the next one before lunch.

Research and Innovation Building A is an 11-story lab and office facility in the Switchyard Innovation District in southeast downtown Fort Worth. It joins the eight-story, 228,000 square foot Law and Education Building that opened the same day, built for $185 million by a Turner Construction, CARCON Industries, Source Building Group, and Dikita Services joint venture, with Stantec and Pelli Clarke and Partners on design.

Project Scope

SmithGroup is design architect on RIB-A, with Bennett Partners as associate architect. Byrne Construction Services is building it. The campus program overall runs as a public-private partnership: Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate with KDC were selected in February 2023 to lead design and construction, with JLL on commercial leasing and ACARI Management Group on community engagement.

Reported figures put the building at roughly $260 million, of which about $150 million covers roughly 150,000 gross square feet of A&M System office and lab space, with $40 million in City of Fort Worth tax increment financing directed at a five-level parking structure. Those numbers come from local reporting rather than a System release, so treat them as reported. Texas A&M AgriLife Research has committed to about 37,000 square feet. Completion is expected in 2029.

Research programs slated for the building span aerospace, engineering, agriculture, health sciences, virtual production, medicine, food and nutrition science, biotechnology, and transportation.

Why It Matters

Six A&M System agencies already sit on the campus: AgriLife Research, AgriLife Extension, TEES, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, TEEX, and the Texas Division of Emergency Management. That’s an unusual concentration of applied research capacity to drop into a downtown core, and it’s the argument behind the System’s projection of 25,000 direct and indirect jobs and $3 billion in annual economic activity once the campus is complete.

The delivery structure is the part other university systems will study. Handing campus development to a P3 team rather than running it through a state construction agency moved the first building from selection to occupancy in about three and a half years, in a market where public higher-ed projects routinely take longer. Fort Worth put TIF money behind the parking to make the density work.

Project Team & Details