Emdones26's Account

Overall, your demonstration of design process through your ealier entries, the excellent dcoumentation of your ideas and how they developed work together to give us a great idea of how your project changed, as well as why it changed. This is a very good project that you have clearly spent a good deal of time and effort on toward a better understanding of the issues that need to be solved.
Excellent work - keep it up!

This is a beautiful shelter, and it's clear that you've put a lot of thought into pretty much every aspect of the design. From maximizing space to ensuring sustainability - great job all around.

Thank you for the thorough site analysis! This really helps me to understand the project moving forward into the next steps.

A wonderfully thorough and thoughtful scheme.

A few of the superlative items that are worth mentioning, each which added together leads to a very comprehensive scheme. It is fantastic to have studied the project, both the existing conditions and your proposed design in a variety of media, whether hand sketches, physical models, 3D renderings, etc... This displays talents in multiple media, but also allows you to use different tools to study elements in the most efficient and clear ways. Two fundamental items that you have included in your final design are absolutely essential to a convincing concept: introducing figures for scale, and providing the mass of the existing building for context. Without these two things as part of the background of your shelter, the design would be significantly less legible to the viewer who may not be familiar with your school, or can figure out from other clues how large the spaces are relative to a person.

The fact that you were able to produce some much work on the design is remarkable, but then you also found time to hone in on the bike racks themselves and also a recycling strategy is fantastic. These side studies did not adversely affect your concept, and instead enhance the thoughtfulness of your scheme. Lastly, it is great to include reference images, but you also made sure to explain why it inspired you which is important for the viewer to understand your motivations.

You clearly have immense talents, drive and determination, and also a willingness to study a variety of options, which is essential to a successful design process. A few things that you might want to consider in future projects. You have obviously developed a unique style, approach and design language - all fantastic, and something many professionals have not achieved. Strive to achieve a hierarchy in your design - right now the wave form, the colors, the materials and all of the various furniture and landscape elements are all rendered at the same level of detail and quality. It is helpful to establish a big idea that you constantly refer to and have the other elements support it, both architecturally as well as graphically. Along the same lines, while it is great to have all of the different media presented, it would elevate the images even more to have a consistent graphic theme to the presentation. Common fonts, colors, and title blocks allow you to establish your own brand identity on all of your material.

It is impressive that you considered so many alternatives, and reviewed them and ranked them to determine the best concept. I am not sure that it is clear what your own criteria for the selection was - how did you determine what makes one better than another? There will always be a level of intuition - this one is better than that - however there should also be objective requirements: this scheme satisfies the functional requirements better, this scheme works with local materials better, or this one fits into the environmental context better. As you go on to present concepts to professors and clients, you want to lead them on a journey through your thought process. At the end your audience should believe that the final solution was the only one possible, simply because of the intelligent steps you took a long the way. This is what will take you to a higher level of design quality.

Again, really well done - you should be extremely proud of your work. Keep pushing yourself further - the possibilities are endless. Best of luck in the future.

Just a friendly reminder, you must upload photos and text for each step of the design process to be eligible for judging in the competition. Good luck!

Keep going but watch your "due" dates! Due 5-15-2012

Emily what's happening ? Poor progress in Div 6 & Div7? Please e-mail me right away.

Congratulations!  Your project has been awarded a First Grand Prize by the 2011 Newhouse Architecture Competition jury yesterday.  To celebrate your awesome work, we’re including this project as a ‘Featured Student Project’ on the website.  It will now appear in the sidebar of the Student Gallery and on the homepage in the rotating queue. 
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Share this link to your project with your friends on your Facebook page! 
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Don’t forget to bring your family with you to the awards ceremony and exhibition opening on the evening of Thursday, June 2. (Details will follow in an email.)  You can also visit the Robert Morris University Gallery between now and June 11 to see your project on display along with all the student projects.  Congrats again!

You have done a great job of documenting your design process, and have developed a very creative solution to the design challenge. Congratulations on a great project.

An extremely creative submission. Well researched and well executed. Your concept is exciting, functional and becomes an important landmark on the street. Well done.