With a plethora of sprawling buildings in my portfolio, my fourth year professor suggested I design a project for AISC’s Steel Design Open Competition. The program had to be comparable to the non-open competition – an aquatic swimming/diving center. The space submitted had to require long span steel structures and utilize modern steel construction methods. Under these constraints, the building would undoubtedly be a large, cellular building. Drawing from my experience exercising along the Potomac River just south of DC, I proposed an exercise research center, headquarters for Gatorades product analysis department, to replace an existing power plant along my favorite jogging trail. The GSSI, Gatorade’s Sport Science Institute, would allow enthusiasts and beginners alike to take their personal exercise to an all new level, while providing the Gatorade scientists with larger sample sizes for their data analysis.

To kickoff the spring semester of fourth year design school, an Arbor Day competition was held where students were asked to design something to enhance Frady Park, a small green space in a nearby neighborhood. Students could design whatever they wanted so long as it cost less than a thousand hundred dollars to make and that it drew on the traditions of Arbor Day for its inspiration.

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.

Design is almost always a process of problem solving. Architects, planners, product designers, and artists start with some subject matter and they work to produce a composition that engages the viewer with the subject. A good design is one that evokes a feeling from the user of certainty, as if its solution is meant to be, and that any alternative design would be less effective than the design they are seeing. When my school found itself the recipient of a few hundred pounds of donated concrete, of course we had a concrete design competition. My roommate and I teamed up to join in the fun.

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.