Interior Design Students Create Large-Scale Installations Based on the Concept of a Threshold

Photo by Mattie Bailey

Jasmine Jetton, left, and Jessica Phan, both interior design students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, present their large-scale project that explored thresholds on Oct. 12. They hoped to entice the busy students walking by to sit and relax and interact with the Fulbright Peace Fountain area.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Earlier this month, there was more color around Vol Walker Hall than the fall season typically calls for. Windy Gay, an instructor in interior design, had challenged fourth-year interior design students to explore thresholds with a set of projects. The four teams of two students each presented large-scale installations Oct. 12 outside of Vol Walker Hall, home to the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, with their responses to the design challenge.

Gay said that there were several parts to the threshold project, and the exercises were meant to have the students think more deeply about the spatial as well as conceptual realities of threshold. She defined threshold as a something that is a "condition of space, but [that] can also occur outside the physical." There are "political, social, economic, racial, environmental and mental thresholds." The projects emerged in hues of vivid green, bright yellow and hot pink.

Thresholds divide countries, "tell us when we have met our limit, or when we pass into another state of awareness and feeling," Gay said. "Thresholds contain us and let us pass. They bring the outside in and the inside out. They frame, and they define."

The teams were comprised of Jessica Phan of Fort Smith and Jasmine Jetton of Fayetteville; Nathalie Vitek of Vienna, Austria, and Kelsey Winters of Bailey, Colorado; Emma Lambeth of Carthage, Missouri, and Kayla McKean of Little Rock; and Kelsey Fenton of Fayetteville and Elisha Taldo of Springdale.

The team designs and constructions were presented to Gay; Allison Thurmond, a landscape architect in Fayetteville; Scott Biehle, clinical assistant professor in landscape architecture; Kim Furlong, assistant professor of interior design; Jennifer Webb, associate professor of interior design; and Laura Terry and Frank Jacobus, both associate professors of architecture.

The first part of the project included students' "consumption of what is a threshold," Gay said. Students went on walks, took pictures and videos, wrote, sketched and picked up artifacts having to do with threshold. The students made a one-minute video on their threshold manifesto — to make a claim about a threshold.

For the second part of the project, students paired up into teams. The teams investigated threshold conditions that exist immediately around Vol Walker Hall. They documented the thresholds found and mapped the sequence through space. From the sequence thresholds the teams mapped, they selected one and then created a three-dimensional model incorporating the mapped information collected while trying to "convey some particular phenomenological quality that can only be experienced in time," Gay said.

For the third part of the threshold investigation project, each team designed and constructed a site-specific threshold intervention responding to the team's chosen threshold. An intervention, Gay said, is making a change in some way to reveal, accentuate, redefine or transform a space.

The teams created a schematic design along with another model depicting their finished design. Gay said the interventions had to be temporary, not damage property or vegetation, be structurally sound and not block circulation paths.

Some of the installations are still on temporary display. Discussions with the interior design students and more details about their designs can be found at the school's Form Plus Function design blog.