Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Jennifer Branham, an environmental design major at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture, turned a class project during her fall 2008 semester abroad in Italy into a second-place finish and cash prize in a contest sponsored by her host city, Castiglion Fiorentiono.
In the competition, “Portrait of Castiglion Fiorentino,” Branham and fellow students at Texas A&M’s Santa Chiara Study Center, which is located in the Tuscan village, were invited to submit entries using any medium that captured the essence of the walled town of 12,000 people located approximately 130 miles north of Rome.
Branham’s entry, “A New Perspective,” was a study of the town’s doorknobs, ranging from the ordinary to the ornate.
“Normally when you’re in a town, you look at its views, its main buildings, or its towers,” she said. Our class assignment was to go and look at other things that make a town unique and I picked door hardware,” she said.
The project started with a particular site in Castiglion Fiorentino. Students had to pick a six-meter area of the site and focus on an element in that area.
“Our site had this really old door, and a simple doorknob on it, so I did a study of the relationship between doorknobs and the specific area of town and the door or building it was located on,” she said.
She had quite a variety of doorknobs to work with, from doorknobs on residences, on makeshift backyard and garden doors, and ornate ones in the central area of the town.
She photographed about 50 doorknobs and selected her favorites from the group, but lacked a way to display them.
“I didn’t want to just post them on a piece of poster board or paper,” she said.
She found the solution in a downstairs room of the Santa Chiara Study Center — “where we wash our clothes,” she said — an old, abandoned window approximately 1.5 x 2.5 feet.
“I cleaned it up a little bit and put the photos on it,” she said.
The piece, which will be on permanent display in the town, netted Branham a prize of 200 euros, which rounds out to approximately $230.
The contest was part of a great semester abroad, she said.
“I would go back tomorrow. I loved it. I really liked the culture and the people as well as the region we were in. The views were amazing. Everywhere you looked just took your breath away,” she said.
While abroad, Branham joined fellow students on trips to Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, and many other Italian destinations.
She and her fellow students also traveled to Spain, Paris, Germany and Belgium during the semester.
