At the beginning of the project, the owners did not plan to implement any major changes in the layout, like moving or removing and walls. They mostly wanted to talk about installing new cabinets and instituting minor changes in the layout of the cabinets. There main goal was to update and brighten the kitchen. Mr. Chatelain, a weekend DIY warrior, would contract the project himself, so I had to take that into consideration. By implementing small, but effective design decisions, this renovation project would ultimately retire the classic isolated kitchen form for the Chatelain family.

If designing a house for my self is the first reason I went to architecture school, designing a house for my father is definitely the second. When my uncle’s residential contractor company, HCH, acquired several acres to develop, I told my dad to ask for the most difficult parcel available. The lot we had was surrounded by two ponds, two massive live oak trees, and an 18’ drop in slope right where the house should go. After hundreds of yards of dirt were added and we met over lots of dinners, we settled on a ‘C’ shaped house that would terrace the landscape. Using collaged drawings and diagrams, and a constantly changing 3d model, the finished design takes full advantage of the beautiful landscape on all sides. The house took almost a year to build but our efforts paid off; the house has been published in local residential design magazines and won my uncle’s contracting company, HCH, a local builder’s award.

Woman’s Hospital has been proudly bursting at the seams for some time at its current location in the center of Baton Rouge. With the eastern expansion of the city and the development of the I-10 Interstate system after 2006, Woman’s Hospital decided to move their beloved campus to a new location capable of providing the experience their customers expect, and the care the growing community needs. Their vision is to provide a state-of-the-art facility approximately 5 miles from the current campus. The new campus is located on the corner of Airline Highway and Pecue Lane. The goal was to create a new hospital that will be aesthetically pleasing, technologically advanced, and focused on an exceptional patient experience. Ford|Dickinson partnered with HKS, out of the Dallas/Ft.Worth area, to design the new campus. F|D would be responsible for the design of the public spaces, patient rooms, and other hospitality areas.

The Mindrut House is built along the golf course in the University Club, a gated subdivision in Baton Rouge. The house is in a part of the subdivision required to embody the character of New Orleans’ French Quarter. In essence, this house had to adopt a row house exterior’s design strategy, even though the house would have a garage in front of the home. The owners, the Mindrut family, were more interested in more progressive interior designs than the required New Orleans architecture, exterior façade. The final design scheme presents a solid but quieter version of a French Quarter home. The main components of the exterior are a Greek revival frieze and entryway, Acadian shutters, and a Colonial styled courtyard expanding off the garage walls. Once inside the house you realize the aesthetic is just a shell to incase an open, contemporary home nestled inside.

With the growth of web-based shopping and digital media, Bluefly finds itself at the cutting edge of browser based shopping. No longer will people find themselves packing malls and shopping centers, rummaging through countless piles of inventory. Digging through the mad house of marked down clothing has been made simple with the help of Bluefly’s internet database of fine clothing. The only drawback to Bluefly’s operation is the problem of fitting the clothing to individual levels of comfort – both in physique and persona. With this project, I designed Fitting Centers where potential Bluefly customers can test-fit clothing to their unique body and personality. After doing so, they can order the clothes in the Fitting Center, or back at home online. The customer will then receive their garments directly at their doorstep. If the clothes don’t work out, just return them to your local Fitting Center for a refund or exchange.

Conventional history, for the most part, tells us that architects’ drawings are considered outside of the study of fine art. Normal architectural practice simply puts drawings to use without reflection. The assumption as it stands is that architects’ drawings present a thin description of reality specific to a singular subject matter, devoid of any objective interpretation. But why is the painter’s mark considered replete with all aspects of its stroke given meaning, while the line of an architect’s diagram has its meaning attenuated? The Mirror of Drafting course presented students with several assignments meant to unveil the expressive medium of drawing.

Urban design seminar required students to team up into large groups of six or more to design a city located in the Piedmont region of western Virginia. My group was asked to design a bounded city with a density of almost 40,000 people per square mile. The city had to be able to support approximately one million people and had to offer all the typical components of a functioning city: civic agencies, educational board strategies, parks, building archetypes, and other infrastructure.

The final project of second year studio asked students to design a crematorium, a place where the deceased are cremated. The project site was located between the civic center and industrial manufacturing areas along a linear lake in Baton Rouge. Given our studio’s emphasis on design process, materials theory, site inventory, and the analysis and impacts of place, the unfamiliarity of the crematorium’s use would help students focus on the studio’s themes rather than the building itself.

Primarily a drawing exercise, this assignment asked students to create a pavilion using a specific kit of modeling materials that expressed the qualities of light and shadow. Students were asked to use their previously made contour models as the site for the pavilion. Once completed, the models had to be surveyed and drawn at 1:1 scale, and shaded as necessary.

Focused entirely on freehand drawing, the work presented here was done for a class that taught students traditional types of two- and three-dimensional projection drawings. With an understanding of the value of these different types of drawings, students could then use these techniques in their studio design process. Weekly assignments asked students to construct accurate projections of objects and or spaces, learn the terms used in drawing, successfully develop a control of line weight and paper usage, to explain the strengths and weaknesses of various orthographic and perspective drawing, and to select the best drawing type for a given problem.