In spring 2008, Lamar Advertising decided to relocate its existing corporate headquarters to 5321 Corporate Boulevard, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A renovation project, 5321 Corporate is conceived as a transformation from heavy, impenetrable brutalism to strength, grace, movement, and optimism. The existing 115,000 square foot facility would need to be renovated to accommodate all current Lamar corporate employees and allow for reasonable future growth. The interior design would foster an open work environment with a variety of multipurpose meeting rooms and communal areas. Even the executive offices and conference rooms would be located in the same general vicinity as the conventional office space. Central to the clients’ design requirements, the design would need to be neat and unassuming. Ford|Dickinson’s proposal sought to smooth out a shift in the urban grid.

While the first two years of architecture school introduce students to general concepts of space as the inverse of form, this third year project would begin to ask students to control specific characteristics of space. How fast can space move? How can space alter someone’s mood? Etc. In this project, students were asked to identify the characteristics of space that make people comfortable. While visiting the site students had to articulate what they thought about it and how their design would relate to “the space of human comfort,” and only after having done that would a student be given the full assignment sheet. The building program focused on three sequential spaces: the caldarium, a hot plunge bath; the frigidarium, a community bath in unheated water; and the tepidarium, a warm bath or sauna experience. The bath house facility also had to provide exercise areas, locker rooms, fragrant gardens, and spaces for building staff and administration.

Focused on seeing the world around us, the end of first year studio draws the students to realize their own process of seeing – that seeing is an act that precedes definition, a kind of pre-action controlled through intentionality, interpreted by an internal filter that appropriates meaning. Part of what makes a designer “good” is their ability to dislocate their own subconscious gaze in order to see the problems they are solving through the eyes of those they are designing for. A doghouse does not have to perform like a human house (although sometimes it does), and so on. This project, dubbed “The Lighthouse,” challenged the students to design something architectural that brought others face-to-face with their own inner sight.