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.

In 2004 when Hurricane Ivan made landfall in Gulf Shores, Alabama, it would be the 10th most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings and gnarled the buffer islands all along the Gulf of Mexico, it would go down as the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the US. The only project of fall semester, fifth year studio, asked students to design a new facility for the Mississippi Park’s Department to replace the heavily damaged Nature Center in Ocean Springs, MS. The building would house exhibits about the local ecosystem and the gulf islands national seashore program, offer a place of refuge for park rangers and visitors, and would be an exemplar of how a structure in such a hostile environment should not only survive, but flourish through the use of efficient building techniques in this coastal zone.

When offered, I jumped at the chance to design a new house for my Aunt and Uncle. Having never designed a real building before – in the sense that what’s going to be built is what’s real – I made certain to work closely with the home owners in the design process. During the interview process I realized that they wanted to live in a park-like oasis but that they were really worried about privacy. Aside from the programmatic requirements, the bulk of the design process explored methods to enclose a private space that would be open to an exterior. The final design provides program clusters connected by a thin hallway.

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.

In urban studio, this project asked students to design a mixed use building that challenged the traditional arrangement of its scheme – public facility on the ground floor and private rooms for rent on the upper floor. Students were asked to pick their own site for the project, to propose the clientele, and the needs of the clientele on their own. I chose to work with a popular coffee house down the block from my school. The project was to include all the mixed use functions typically found in a building of this type, but would offer opposition to the traditional norms found in buildings of this kind. Up would be down. Walls would become the sky, and so on.

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.

The main project of fall studio, third year students were asked to demonstrate an understanding of building program, site analysis and planning, functional planning, and congruent solutions of architectural systems in harmony with that earlier analysis. A speculative office development proposal was to be designed at the end of Main Street in Baton Rouge. Students could propose whatever tenant they wanted for the site but they had to allow for 80% of the building to house open office space for future use. Aside from their own intentions, students were required to address an existing ordinance for the Louisiana State Capitol Complex Development Plan, Plan BR.