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.