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.

The classic viewing space of a museum is calm, bounded by walls and ceilings, and well lit. The space is static. The room is kept simple so as not to take away from the viewing of the art collection being displayed. The 2x4 Museum project called for students to design an anti-museum. Where typically calm, this museum would be dramatic. The arts’ presentation would delay its exposure as opposed to being overt. The building (if we can call sticks and cardboard a building) itself should embody the art - long, engaging, dynamic, etc.

Second year studio introduces abstract, theoretical organizational concepts; space, form, function, and the resolution of materials and structural systems. How do we perceive space? What are the relationships between space and form? Is space something to be designed, and if so, what are the factors dictating the design of space? These are the questions second year students learn to answer. In the staircase project students were asked to design a staircase that resists its own terminus.