Last December, amidst the chilly winter in Boston, our team returned to warmer weather at Virginia Tech for our 3rd OpenLAB Studio Exhibition! We unpacked, sawed, measured, drilled and assembled everything in the lobby of Cowgill Hall in Blacksburg, Virginia.
This year’s exhibit included small to full scale mock-ups including façade planter boxes, modular bookshelves, CNC foam column assemblies, walnut hardwood models and many more!
Students and visitors alike were intrigued, the sounds of their “whoas” and “cools” circulating throughout the space. It was great to see people appreciate the students’ work and be inspired by it.
Alongside the exhibition, our time at the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design included two sessions of lobby talks giving visitors insight to the studio prompt and the nuances of each project, a face-to-face meeting with the upcoming cohort of students, and finally a lecture by Parke MacDowell to all freshmen in their foundation year. He covered a wide spread of material centering around fabrication, design and people.
Seeing the semester’s work curated and represented in the exhibition provided a feeling of overwhelming fulfillment and affirmation. Its re-composition led me to be acutely aware, to intently re-observe the outputs of the semester. I imagine this feeling to be similar to my colleagues who have been in the profession longer, to see drawing sets built, lines and walls formed by conversations over sketch paper, completed buildings from concept models, etc. The presented work goes beyond its physicality and embodies the culmination of all efforts and forces manifested. A composite of the previous years, the expertise and advice of each mentor, the academic and professional career of each professor, and the seeds planted in each student we work with.
As the summer gets underway, we look forward to Fall 2024, yet another enriching season for ourselves and our students.
Sandrine Héroux, Sophie McKenzie, and Emily Chowdhury are each members of our in-house Fabrication team. Their day-to-day work centers on a simple question: what changes when design becomes something people can physically test?
These women challenge the notion of fabrication as a support service, framing it instead as an essential component of architectural authorship, a way to test ideas, share agency, and widen the boundaries of what architectural practice can include.
In our most recent blog, they discuss their individual paths in architecture and reflect on their experience using fabrication as a tool for fostering shared agency, community engagement and broadening the role of the architect. Link in bio!
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