Tag: education

ARCH 403 Mid-Review

Arch 403 Mid Review 1 from Brady Dorman on Vimeo.

Ever wonder what an architecture school studio review is like? The video is of my studio group’s critique at today’s mid-review for 5th year comprehensive studio. As I’ve described in previous posts, we are designing a [hypothetical] velodrome in Boston. In the video one of my partners Jamin introduces our design at this point and then I elaborate on site design and our method to contextualize with the adjacent neighborhood and the city as a whole.

Our critics were three faculty members in the College of Design: Nadia Anderson, Ann Sobiech-Munson, and Dean Emeritus Mark Engelbrecht. I believe our review went quite well and provided valuable feedback for moving forward from this point. It is clear our next step will be to integrate a thoughtful structural system into our aesthetic gesture, which will better clarify building and technical specifications of the design.

Select comments from the critics:

“I think there’s something that’s really working about what you’ve presented here. It’s maybe not necessarily this as an aesthetic so much as some of your sensitivities to the human scale and the way that this form kind of responds to the things around it.”
         – Assistant Professor Ann Sobiech-Munson

“I think there’s a language that’s developed out of this that I really appreciate, the relationship between the building itself and the site around it…”
         – Assistant Professor Nadia Anderson

“I think it, for me, expresses this idea of speed and discipline very beautifully..so I’d be very interested to moving on, you can imagine the idea…”
         – Dean Emeritus Mark Engelbrecht

Visit our studio project blog to follow our design process.

Design Inequity

I am currently in Iowa State’s Design Core program, which all first-year design students must take as a prerequisite for their respective programs. I have had some frustration with the studio projects having little to do with architecture or space, and being more so just art projects. I realize I just have to get through it and stop complaining, but I’ve come to a conclusion regarding environmental design verses art. Contrary to the College of Design’s suggestion that all design is fundamentally the same, all types of design are not equal.

Art is certainly important, but it is simply an expression or a statement. Environmental design (architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, CRP, etc), on the other hand, is more than just an expression, but also a critical function of our daily lives. Furthermore it is more permanent that art and it’s responsible to the common good of everyone, not just the artist. This is why I have frustration with the combined first year courses at ISU. It gives me little opportunity to implement fundamental design principles in the kind of design I’m passionate about and better able to excel in. Environmental design and the people it serves is what I care about. I am out for much more than just a statement.

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