After a final year of classes, studio time, teamwork building and project designing, architecture seniors will join together one last time to exhibit their senior design projects at the ninth annual Chumash Architecture Show, which showcases fifth year architecture students’ theses, starting Friday.
This year’s show, “Unfold,” is a way for all 160 fifth-year architecture students to showcase their last three quarters of design work in a gallery setting for the public to see. The projects consist of physical models, drawings and digital renderings.
Architecture senior and committee member Anthony Fossi said calling the Chumash show “Unfold,” came about as a way to express graduation, “as we go out, expand and start careers elsewhere.”
“The year has been interesting,” Fossi said. And with Friday night’s reception marking the opening of the show, “I’m really excited, it’s all of the fifth years together and is much more of a celebration than stress.”
While each student works on their own thesis project, they also collaborate with a studio group of 20 students. A committee of two to three representatives from each studio worked together to put the event together.
“The project shows the last nine months of work,” architecture senior Danielle Lieu said. “It shows whatever inspired students and whatever they chose to take on this year.”
Projects range from houses to skyscrapers; from cargo shipping containers to food stands, Lieu said.
“At the show, you can see not only the work that was done, but our personality in projects.”
Architecture professor and fifth year student coordinator Tom Di Santo said that having an event like this allows students to find their avenue and find out what interests them.
“It’s really rewarding to work with the students: they take the bull by the horns and make it happen,” Di Santo said. “If it was just left to the faculty to make this happen, it wouldn’t happen.”
Before the Chumash show was started, architecture students relied strictly on smaller, individual shows in the architecture building. The creation of the architecture show raised more visibility for the students’ work.
“Architecture is an interesting profession in that it’s about art, design and creativity, but it’s also a social art,” Di Santo said. “Unlike an artist that can hole up in his or her studio without any regard for other people, architects have to interact with the community, and this is a way for them to showcase all of their talents, not just design talents.”
Because the expectations are ramped up from a typical senior project, but not quite as rigorous as a masters thesis, the architecture design projects are a cross between the two, Di Santo said.
“There’s so many different projects, so many different scales, typologies and design styles,” Di Santo said. “The show celebrates diversity. It shows how everybody is looking at different things, seeing things differently, and appreciating different aspects of people’s work. There’s something for everybody, and what I like, you might not like. What the community might find interesting, the faculty might see as pedestrian. It’s really great to see all of this work and have the venue for that.”
In recent years, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has come to the exhibit and awards five top design projects each year. Cal Poly architecture faculty also choose the best 10 to 12 projects each year, called the “Best in Show.”
“We’re really lucky as faculty here at Cal Poly that we have so many talented students,” Di Santo said. “A lot of them are whole brain thinkers; they can handle analysis of left brain thinking and can also be creative and draw and paint and create.”
There is a sort of extended family closeness within groups, Di Santo said.
“We’re together for the whole year, we get upset at each other, we have fun together, we laugh and we cry,” he said. “I would guess that faculty in other departments don’t see students cry as much as I do.”
The show is May 25 to 27 in the Chumash Auditorium.