Shelter is one of the most basic needs of human kind, but designing homes is anything but basic.
Southwestern College’s architecture program showcased the skills required for the profession at the SWC Architecture Expo, held at the student gallery.
Diana de la Torre, advisor to the architecture club, organized the project and helped the architecture program to put on this exhibition.
Most of the models and designs were interesting and well made, but a few pieces needed some home improvement.
Despite the program’s focus on transferring students to a more specialized architecture school, students are also given the tools to build their portfolios and pursue internships.
Creating models, drafting layouts and using design programs like AutoCAD and Revit are the basic skills needed to get into the world of architecture and make up much of the grunt work involved in an internship. Sculpting, graphic design and sketching are also useful skills as an architect.
Examples of student work included case studies of actual architectural projects, accompanied by models made of balsa wood, cardboard, foamcore, pasteboard and other materials.
A tiny replica of the Nonhyun Limelight Music Consulting by Dia Architecture based in South Korea stood before a poster of the actual building. Like many of the pieces featured at the architecture expo, the creator was left unnamed. A wooden model of the Hechingen Studio, designed by Whitaker Studio but never built, also lacked any credit to who made it.
Sasay Guerrero created an excellent miniature house that she designed. Named “The Reading Garden,” this piece was created by Guerrero for the Architecture 151 -Design II course. It featured a small structure with a curved roof and a large outdoor area with trees and a river of hot glue.
This place, if built, would be an excellent place to relax and read a novel.
Even though the pieces featured were by students of various levels of proficiency, every poster, model, sculpture or design should have been attributed to its creator.
Pieces featured in the student art gallery better served as an example of the architecture program as a whole. Mistakes in presentation made it difficult to take some pieces seriously.
Two such unlabeled pieces were especially poorly presented. One was a poster of a house with various angles and views of the layout. The design was not bad, but beneath the design was a spiel praising the house, saying “this innovative design will change the way we see our near future, by bringing it to our doorsteps today,” and other such overblown rhetoric. If a house is really that great, the design should speak for itself, which, in this case, it did not.
Another strange design was a home designed to look like a cave. The Cave looked like a paper mache sculpture of a huge irregular rock on the outside. It was not the prettiest home, and instead of continuing the organic rock formation that inspired the exterior, the interior simply incorporated simple, square rooms hidden within the large empty shell.
It is understandable that the architecture computer program used to design the building is not capable of the natural organic shapes found in actual caves, but the difference between the interior and exterior was jarring and unpleasant.
One wall in the gallery was dedicated to children’s drawings of their perspective of the homeless. Many depicted homeless people as dangerous animals, though a few explained that these people are unfortunate people with serious issues. Given the high-stakes market architects belong too, it is unfortunate that so much effort is put into designing buildings for the super rich and not creating inexpensive homes for those with no homes.
The children’s drawings featured at the Architecture Expo reflect the sad state of human culture: those with no home are less than human.
