Ryan ChartrandFour Cal Poly architecture alumni competed in an international design competition where they were asked to redesign a modernized White House, called White House Redux, and they answered in a big way.
The team of Jeff Frost, David Iseri, Justin Kruse and Laura Sperry, all of whom have left San Luis Obispo for the busy New York City life, won second place. Over 500 designs were entered from 42 different countries.
The winners were selected by a jury composed of six prominent people in the architecture industry.
Second place came with the perks of a $3,000 prize, the chance to attend the opening of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s contest exhibition and their work featured in the company’s “White House Redux-The Book.”
“I think having our work displayed at Storefront (for Art and Architecture) for a month was the most significant reward,” Frost said.
The contest prompt was launched on Jan. 15 and the applicants had until April 27 to create the project. “(It took) several brainstorm lunch and dinner sessions at the beginning, and then we all waited until the last two weekends before it was due before doing any real work,” Kruse said.
“My two favorite parts were brainstorming everything at the beginning and then having it all come together on the last day,” Sperry said. “We decided to switch to the photocopied book layout the morning of the competition deadline, so the rest of the day was a fantastic scramble to get everything done.”
Two of the group members were inspired by a professor they had while studying abroad in Italy during their senior year of college. “The whole thing was a kind of homage to a group of radical Italian architects from the 1960’s called Superstudio,” Kruse said.
The group’s project consists of 12 different design concepts. “Each page of our proposal is a supposed excerpt from a larger volume of work that describes fictional future histories of our nation,” Kruse said.
Each future history is vastly different. “(They) range from a nation where the economy has collapsed and we turn to Vegas for answers, to a nation where the government now resides in a city in space, connected to the earth by way of a space elevator,” he said.
“I like to view it as a book of the dead, serial vignettes of various spells and desperate incantations and a warning of their pitfalls,” Frost said.
Their first concept entitled Terrorist Billboard came from “realizing that the White House as a building has no amazing architectural significance other than being a symbol of the USA. This solution reduced the building into nothing more than that, a pure image,” Kruse said.
Another page, Superhappinesstopia, is full of eclectic symbolism.
“Superhappinesstopia envisions a turning point in the East-West relationship. For example, the zebras represent foreign policy, the rainbow is the U.S. economy, the cows represent California’s cheese production, the vomited flowers represent rebirth,” Kruse said.
Some of the other titles include Self-Demolition Protocol for a Super Intelligent Automated Processing Core, High Above the Hinterland, Asylum for a Godly Order, In Pursuit of the Dreams of Youth and Bohemian Grotesque.
“White House Redux -The Book” consists of information about the competition, the results process, 123 group designs and the four winning design concepts. To see their award-winning designs, visit http://www.whitehouseredux.org