Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Texas Monthly observes the 10th anniversary of the Bonfire tragedy with a cover story including comments of former students and professors from Texas A&M’s College of Architecture about the night it fell and the resulting memorial, which was dedicated in 2004.
“It only took a short amount of time to know that everyone could not be accounted for,” Brittny Allison Landers told the magazine’s Pamela Colloff about Bonfire’s fall. She earned a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree in 2002 and is now a superintendent for a general contractor in Houston.
Larry Grosse, who was on the construction science faculty from 1981 to 1996, said he worked with students to develop improvements that would strengthen Bonfire’s design, like interlocking the logs on different tiers and cinching up stack with a cable. “From what I understand, those practices fell by the wayside not long after I left A&M,” he told Colloff.
Grosse said Bonfire had much to teach students, however.
“Students got to oversee a true construction project,” he said. “They had a budget, workers, materials, and a timetable that they had to stick to. Obviously Bonfire had to be finished before the game.”
Bob Shemwell, ’82, an Outstanding Alumnus of the college, is a principal at Overland Partners, a design firm in San Antonio. He was the lead architect on the Overland team that designed the Bonfire memorial.
“The Bonfire tradition, although it manifested itself in a big pile of wood that got set on fire, was not ultimately about that,” Shemwell told Texas Monthly’s Lisa Gartner. “It was really about the fact that you would pile out of your bed early in the morning, go downstairs. You would meet people that lived on the first floor, second floor, that you would not ever meet your entire year, and you would spend all day working together. You would start to build relationships and friendships that would sometimes last your whole life.”
George Rogers, professor of urban planning, was co-chairman of the committee that selected Shemwell’s design.
“I’m not surprised that the winning design came from an Aggie. All of the finalists had an Aggie on them some place—a few, maybe, or a handful, but there was usually an Aggie someplace on that team,” he told Gartner.
For Texas Monthly’s coverage of the Bonfire tragedy, visit http://www.texasmonthly.com/2009-11-01
- Posted: Oct. 26, 2009 -
