Three Scales of Design

Project title: 3 Scales of Design
Course title: First-Year Studio
Professor/Instructor: Ben Ellefson
Students: Thomas O'Brien, Stephen Malbouef, Jalen Smith and Ryan Younan

Course description: The first semester is introductory, whose character is high energy, creative, reflective and enthusiastic. It is intended to introduce students to design concepts of form, space and composition, in two and three dimensions, and how they relate to human experiences. Students are introduced to the principles of design and the design process as a foundation for architectural design. Being the first studio course, the assumption is that the student comes with limited to no design or drawing skills.

Student work description: The second half of the first semester design studio involved the design of an object at three different scales. The initial step was at the scale of a toy in which the students had to design a series of three toys between 3”-12” which were built at a scale of 1:1 and documented in detailed drawings that might be used by a manufacture to create the toy. Next, they worked at the human scale to create a sculpture which was to be influenced by their toy design. The sculptures +/- 6’x6’x6’ built at a scale of 1 ½” = 1’-0” and they built a 1:1 portion of their sculpture, and were tasked with documenting the sculpture as an analytic cubism painting.  For the final scale, they had to design a folly placed in the Dequindre Cut Trail located between Lafayette and Larned Streets, each student had a plot of land +/- 30’x30’, and these were documented using traditional architectural drawing conventions of plan, section, elevation, and perspective drawing. The intention of the assignments was to introduce students to the various scales of design and what considerations need to be addressed with each one as well as forcing the first-semester students to investigate a verity of ways in which design ideas can be built and documented.