Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Out of an imagined disaster came a great success Jan. 23 in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.
The “disaster,” part of an experiment, hatched by department head Glen Mills, was a daylong charette in which students in both graduate and undergraduate design studios were asked to design temporary emergency shelters to house victims of an unspecified natural disaster for up to three days.
“I thought we’d run an experiment in the department to bring the entire department together,” he said.
“We are so big as a department and our students are so separate from one another that they hardly ever have an opportunity to get together and discuss design among one another at different levels,” said Mills. “Design is the core competency of the department, and this charette helped intensify the conversation about design throughout the department,” he said.
At 8:30 a.m., students received their task: to create design models of the temporary shelters, which would be crafted from cardboard. The models were constructed at 1:12 scale, using one sheet of 11” x17” cardstock. At full scale, the design would provide a maximum of 187 square feet of material to work with.
“The idea was to design something which could be folded quite simply, and parachuted out of an aircraft in large numbers, packed to go in packages, and sent down to people in distress,” said Mills, who came up with the design problem with architecture lecturers Craig Babe and Marcel Erminy.
Working in two-person teams, students had until 5 p.m. to complete their work, then display them for judging in the Langford A atrium.
Mills liked what he saw from the students as they day progressed.
“There was great enthusiasm,” he said. “I went to all the studios and I saw intellectual enthusiasm, people having fun, and involvement from everyone.”
The student teams’ solutions surprised Mills, with some teams linking their shelters together to create a common, open space.
“Here were students thinking beyond the instructions, and that was terrific. They were thinking socially, thinking about community,” he said. “When societies are in distress, the idea of a community is important. When you’re out there in the cold and the rain, having other people and working with other people is important.”
Mills sees the event as the beginning of a new departmental tradition.
“From now on, we’ll have a design charette at the beginning of every semester. It’s going to help us cohere as a school of architecture,” he said.
