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.

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.

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.

An aspiring architect’s ability to interpret, discuss and understand architectural space begins in first year studio. What is Architecture? What is beyond the scope of Architecture? Early studio projects force students to question the common notion that architecture is the backstage and that what's backstage is architecture. This project looks at the architecture of the urban environment through a map of motion and sensorial experiences, begging the question “where do fact and fiction merge?”

The root function of a practicing architect centers on their ability to follow rules, like building codes and client requirements. This first semester project, dubbed the nest, had to hold a half pound object on a 4"x4" platform 48" above the ground a minimum of 4" away from any surface such as a wall, stairwell, tree, etc. The nest could not be permanently affixed to any surface, could only touch the floor at one point but could touch any other amount of surfaces as necessary. Students were asked to take on these rules as a source of inspiration rather than an oppressive constraint in the design of the nest.