Best of Class: Student Awards

As part of closing out the 2019–2020 academic year, Taubman College rewarded excellence in the annual Student Show and in work by graduating students. While a sampling of the award-winning work is seen here, the complete gallery is on Taubman College’s Flickr page at taubmancollege.umich.edu/flickr/albums.

BURTON L. KAMPNER MEMORIAL AWARD – FIRST PLACE (THESIS / M.ARCH) Marco Nieto: “Autopsia in Abstentia.” Faculty: El Hadi Jazairy.

The nuclear disaster stylized Chernobyl’s landscape, and multiple realities are fighting and struggling for their voice to be heard by the world. This project’s interventions form a temporally and spatially open system that focuses on reworking and appropriating a set of conditions that affect the local, environmental, and bio-political. These apparatuses will vary in scale and scope in order to better comprehend the magnitude and severity of nuclear collapse by fragmenting the site into understandable bits, composing the framework of an evolutionary landscape that keeps the sophistication of heavy industry in an effort to understand it, while also providing a sympathetic second life that is often caught between realities.

STUDENT SHOW – FIRST PLACE (M.ARCH) Laura Lisbona: “Theater as Iranian Tomb Tower.” Faculty: Eduardo Mediero.

Theater as Iranian Tomb Tower” “ examines the typological extents of the theater and proposes a new space that allows for an alternative, contemporized, and dramatic experience. It is based on the idea that in order to fit into the typology, a theater can be identified as a “place to experience the extreme.” The project is a critical response to the over-stimulation of life in post-digital megacities and the need for a theater that allows for an extremely individual experience. The interior is arranged as a series of “Progressive Theaters,” a new genre in which the lines between viewer and performer become blurred. In “Theater as Iranian Tomb Tower,” the occupant can decide how to experience each progressive space.

WALLENBERG STUDIOS AWARD – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.) Cayman Langton and Natsume Ono: “Alternating Duality.” Faculty: Matiss Groskaufmanis.

The 2020 Wallenberg Studios’ theme was From the Margins. “Alternating Duality” identifies a petroleum coking refinery located in Texas City, Texas, where the continued production of petcoke, a refining byproduct, is contributing to both local and international damage. To shed light on the problem, the project proposes a public intervention that replaces half of the existing, functioning elements with a ghost-like shadow of its past, while maintaining production capability of the other half to showcase the destructive occupancy of the present. This mode of decommissioning invites people to observe alternating dualities of detrimental productivity and benign unproductivity.

The Wallenberg Awards are made possible through the generosity of the Benard L. Maas Foundation.

STUDENT SHOW – FIRST PLACE TIE (M.ARCH) Anhong Li, Baekgi Min, Lucas Rigney: “In Praise of Shadows.” Faculty: Craig Borum, Claudia Wigger.

This project aims to evoke the traditional intimacy and sensitivity of Japanese culture within a contemporary dwelling concept. The new mixed-use architecture combines a neighborhood center with residences to introduce a new type of urban fabric, horizontally and vertically interweaving different relationships between public and private space. Twelve wells of shadow are generated under the logic of the structural grid and the scale of the dwelling. As spatial voids, these wells establish various scales of intimacy and character among the mixing neighborhood.

STUDENT SHOW – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.) Phillip Allore, Clare Coburn, Mitchell Lawrence: “Terran Enclave.” Faculty: Daniel Jacobs.

As climate discourse shifts from “change” to “crisis,” an optimistic outcome requires interventions that renew human-non-human relationships. Contemporary institutions perpetuate status quo forms of knowledge production, which is directly channeled to profitable industries in order to further the exploitation of Earth’s resources. “Terran Enclave” proposes a transdisciplinary institution that works against this by creating diverse forms of knowledge production. It seeks to enable a new way of life that promotes closer working relationships across disciplines and species. The compound mixes communal, domestic, work, and growing spaces so that Terrans can envision a livable future together.

WILLEKE PORTFOLIO COMPETITION – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.) Vikitha Reddy Bezawada

Throughout my architecture education, “ I have had moments when I’ve questioned the importance of architecture. Now, graduating with an architecture degree, I have learnt the importance and relevance of spatial design. Given our current politically and climatically tumultuous state, architects can use their agency as creatives to challenge our politically driven world and provide solutions to this anthropogenic era. I am a designer and a critical thinker at heart, and I cannot be more excited to start implementing my skills and thinking into the real world. Architects don’t just make drawings; architects shape the world,” says Bezawada.

WILLEKE PORTFOLIO COMPETITION – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.) Gian Anovert

Operation | \-p-r-shn: Any of various mathematical or logical processes (such as addition) of deriving one entity from others according to a rule. “As I progressed throughout my college career the exuberance of design has escaped me. Lending my designs to be informed by operations, not intuition. By defining these operations, I now enter a phase where my exuberance must return and entangle with new logics and operations,” says Anovert.