ARC 551: Design Studio is a requirement in the second semester of the Master’s of Architecture program. I am taking this class right now under the instruction of Peter Smith and Steven Turnipseed in fall 2010. They are giving two projects, a three week project and a thirteen week project, in this semester. I want to tell you about the interesting first project that graduate students are doing.
There is a website which is a competition base website called ICARCH. There are a lot of competition lists on this site, but every topic has a name “House for …”. The object after “for” could be anything, which is great practice for creating a concept and developing a design based on the concept idea. The competition topic that my professors chose is “House for Lady Gaga”. Yes, you read correctly; they asked graduate students to create a conceptual house for the pop singer Lady Gaga. I was amazed by her soon after I started to research about who Lady Gaga actually is and what kind of message she wants to send out to the world using her music. Everything she does looks so weird, but has meaning, which can be difficult to understand because it has so much depth. However, because of her complicated life style, this conceptual design is interesting.
Moreover, you as an architect need to decide a site for the house which, of course, has to follow your concept and connection to Lady Gaga. Architects or architectural students are usually given a site so this decision becomes tricky because you have to pick one location from all over the world!!
The class project is proving quite interesting to me. It has more focus on design itself. This practice will help me thinking not only about technical design, but also about conceptual design. I hope the thirteen week project, designing a memorial and crematorium, will also be interesting as well.
ICARCH: http://www.icarch.net/
Picture: http://www.ladygaga.com/photos/detail.aspx?fid=15765&phid=15766
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