Art, Sustainability, Feasibility, and Prototyping

With Christian Jordan, Petra Stanev and Ryan Lohbauer

This semester kicked off the IDEA Studio Curriculum. We put special emphasis on incorporating practical constraints as part of applied design processes. One important factor was understanding the context at the relevant scale, regardless of the size, whether as small as a piece of jewelry or as large as an urban plan. The studio projects consistently incorporated the aspects of aesthetic value, functionality, inventiveness of the idea, and quality of the execution. In two phase framework, the first project tasked students to design a sculptural canopy installation in a section of a historic building’s cavernous double-height residential lobby to highlight and define a newly re-opened bar area. This project was introduced by Petra Stanev and Ryan Lohbauer who worked on this particular building in Center City, Philadelphia. The design required a strong aesthetic, and serve the functional purpose of defining the bar zone, lowering the perceived ceiling, creating an interesting lighting condition, and mitigating potential acoustic issues. The students were assigned to teams of three members, to develop a single common concept for the installation. Subsequently, the members of each team were assigned one of three budgets at random (i.e., low budget, intermediate, and luxury) and asked to individually develop a final design, including a strategy for fabrication and installation with approximate lead times and some documentation of how the project expects to meet the budget.