Student Work Abroad

Several days ago, we visited the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark. Jørn Utzon, by whom the center was designed and for whom the center is named, is most famous for designing the Sydney Opera House.

Sydney Opera House (photo credits: clarkvision.com)

This is his Center, as seen from the Bredning River.

Jørn Utzon Center (photo credits to the Utzon Center website)

Among the exhibits shown at the center, was the final projects of the graduating Aalborg University Architecture and Design majors. The program at AAU is also a five-year program, and the diversity and depth of issues tackled by the students in their final projects resembled that of the CMU fifth year thesis program.

The general consensus of our group of students was, that the work we saw on the walls looked like student work. It was easy enough for us to make that decision, but less so to determine what aspects of the work clued us in to its being designed by students.

This is a project that I felt particularly emblematic of the "student" type of final work.

Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg

Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg

The composition of the poster on the left is common to the work shown at CMU. From the conceptual elevations at the top to the renderings at the bottom, the entire board looks student-produced. Even the line separating the course number from the project name, I've seen in many projects at CMU, and seems to be a device employed exclusively by architecture students.

The accompanying model evidences a more resourceful student; I particularly appreciated the use of dried plaster mesh for the facade.

While the presentations boards did not strike me as particularly remarkable (although I appreciated that they were all in English), the consistently high level of quality shown in the models surprised me. As my year has progressed through the architectural curriculum, I've seen the emphasis in final materials shift away from the final model and more to the digital material. It's a twofold problem: students stop making models and professors stop requiring them especially as the digital model seems to be rendering the physical model obsolete.

I still see an important relevance to the physical model which was confirmed for me by the project at the AAU student projects. Physical models force the architect to consider materials in the way that a digital model does not. Digitally, it's dangerously easy to create a wall out of, literally, nothing. By building a physical model, the architect must consider how the building physically stands up and gets put together. It's much easier to identify design flaws with regards to construction in a physical model, and many students who omit them do so because that have not worked out these conditions. Students who work out these issues in their models successfully rise high above the rest.

SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen

SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen

I get very little exposure to student work outside of CMU, but when I do, I'm surprised at the similarities. If the similarities do not occur because students are sharing information, is it a natural inclination within the student? Or does language and technique get handed down by the professor, which would imply the professors are all gathering their information from a similar pool? Either some group of people at some higher level are sharing information and disseminating it to the architectural community, or, by random chance we're all tapped into a similar mode of thinking that expresses itself in our projects.