Architecture is at its most real when it is experienced. Architecture is not only an opportunity to theorize and question, but an obligation to construct, test, and understand. Ultimately, architecture is real and tangible, and architectural ideas become realized when they can be experienced.

 

In 2011, during our time at the Virginia Tech College of Architecture, Arts and Design, we were a part of the Design/Build Lab team of students that designed and built the Masonic Amphitheater in Clifton Forge, Virginia. The project involved the complete redevelopment of a post-industrial brownfield into a public park and performance space. The architectural concept consisted of a series of sculptural forms emerging out of the landscape to form an acoustic shell and tiered seating for the audience. This formative experience began with a comprehensive study of the geography and demographics of the town, a topographic study of the site, and a community engagement event in which we interviewed as many people from the town as would speak with us. This ultimately led to a structure that was both appropriate for its context and heavily informed by those who were going to use it. 

 

Our academic experience leading up to the Design/Build Lab focused on foundational and conceptual design thought.  We became skilled at conceiving and developing formal and spatial ideas that were tested through drawings, renderings, and scaled models.  From the first day of our design-build curriculum, our professors, Marie + Keith Zawistowski, allowed us to approach our architectural hypotheses in the proving ground of reality. X-Acto knives and tacky glue gave way to table saws and framing hammers. Our digital ideas became constructs that we could touch and feel, and perhaps most importantly, it was up to us to figure out how to build them. We were taught– or maybe allowed the opportunity to discover– that part of creating architecture is not relying on building conventions, but understanding convention as the starting point for designing the construction techniques and methods for realizing an idea.

 

Thinking back on our 9 month experience in Design/Build Lab, I distinctly remember the emphasis that Keith and Marie put on the completion of a project in a calendar year. Less time would either result in an under-developed idea or a low quality construction. More time could easily lead to the over-theorization of an idea before it is tested; resulting in architecture that is treated too preciously rather than usable. The completion of a project in a calendar year allows for a completed work that is developed, experimental, and experiential. For Leo and I and many students of the design/build curriculum, it allowed the liberation to truly test our ideas.

 

Our practice today has its foundations in our design-build experience. We strive to know the tool and the hands that will be used to make a reality of each line we draw. Our ideas are seldom defined by “how things are done around here” and are ultimately for use by people, so we make every effort to design for them and our understanding of them, whether on the scale of the individual, the family, or the community.  

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Photography by Jeff Goldberg, ESTO and design/buildLAB