Three Architecture Students Win Third Annual International Design Competition

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Mark Weaver, a principal architect with Hnedak Bobo Group, stands with Fay Jones School of Architecture students Elsa Lo, Ben Cruce and Andrew Arkell by their award-winning design.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A concept for an urban cemetery that emphasized the design process won this year’s Hnedak Bobo Group International Design Award. Students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture produced the project during their summer 2010 study abroad semester in Mexico City.

Andrew Arkell, Ben Cruce and Elsa Lo, all architecture students, will split the $5,000 prize money awarded by Hnedak Bobo Group, the Memphis, Tenn., architecture firm that also helped judge the submissions. Mark Weaver, a principal architect with the firm and a 1982 graduate of the Fay Jones School, coordinated the competition. The competition recognizes work done from international locales during the school’s study abroad trips.

Arkell is a fourth-year student from Brentwood, N.H.; Cruce is a fifth-year student from Texarkana, Texas; and Lo is a fourth-year student from Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Weaver said his firm likes giving this scholarship for foreign travel because, in addition to providing financial support, they also want to promote the creation of new design. In study abroad, students work in an interesting urban context and have to deal with designing within that dense setting. Weaver also enjoys staying connected to the school — hearing about activities of both faculty and students and scouting for talented graduating students. Weaver is a past member of the school’s Professional Advisory Board and currently serves on the Dean’s Circle.

Students could submit any studio project completed during their required semester of study abroad, in either Rome or Mexico City, in the 2009-10 school year. Five designs were submitted for this third annual award competition. Each design entry was mounted on 30-by-30-inch foam board and accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation.

Competition jurors from the school’s architecture faculty were Tahar Messadi, associate professor; Jeff Huber, adjunct professor and project designer at the University of Arkansas Community Design Center; and Peter Bednar, project designer at the UACDC. The winning designs were announced Oct. 25 during a lunch with pizza and drinks hosted by Hnedak Bobo Group in the second floor gallery of Vol Walker Hall.

Arkell, Cruce and Lo first examined one of the oldest cemeteries in Mexico City, where the interred include royalty. The presence of the tall, “impenetrable” wall enclosing the burial grounds inspired the development of a design that will encourage the city and cemetery to comingle.

Instead of a wall that separates, they began to overlap the programming of the cemetery and the city. “It’s described as the city folding into itself,” Arkell said. They then decided to raise the cemetery up above the public space in walls and ceilings — so “the dead are suspended above you,” Cruce said.

In creating a very private place within a very public space, Lo said, they took the city of skyscrapers and flipped it upside-down, with the dead inhabiting the higher space and the living on the lower space. People can walk around and between these structures; open segments allow sunlight and views of the sky.

After reviewing the submissions, jurors were very impressed by this “ambitious and conceptually strong project, as revealed through very well executed drawings, both tonal and orthographic,” Messadi said. “The students did not rush to design a typical building, but convincingly addressed the challenging idea of a vertical cemetery in Mexico City. The building monumentality in scale and expression is very much complementary to the nature of the program. The series of vertical voids, hovering above a public plinth, responds adequately to the urban problem of adding an unusual program into a dense, urban fabric. It also showcases the building as an extension of the public realm, yet converting the place into a contemplative realm. The piety of place is not expressed through individual graves, but a shared experience of the space.”

The students spent about six weeks on this project, interjected with some time focused on hand drawing. They were limited to just nine sheets of paper, each 22 inches by 30 inches. They drew plans, sections and experiential drawings. Each Monday, they would erase or sand away things from the previous week, and then draw some more. Arkell said he’s never used so many erasers on one project.

With this technique of layering hand drawings, they built upon their design week after week. Cruce said they really enjoyed the “iterative nature” of reworking and reworking the design.

“When you erase something, it never completely goes away,” Arkell said. Some of those earlier ideas still informed later drawings.

This is very different from many studio projects, where students draw images and then set them aside and begin the next sketch on a pristine page. “It becomes an artifact, where as, with this, you’re kind of reworking that,” Arkell said.

“You know you have to erase by the next week, so you don’t get attached to that thing,” Lo said, even if it’s a beautiful drawing. “You produce work, but your mindset is able to change it, and make it better.”

They also started out working on their own, and then tried to arrange the drawings cohesively at the end of the week. By the third week, they were all sitting around the same large drawing, which also helped with the design process.

“It made it easier to see it as a whole piece of paper — as one composition, one thing,” Cruce said.

Weaver said the members of his firm’s in-house jury were most “captivated” by the freehand aspect of these students’ presentation. This group did the best job of showing the process and “evolution of thought,” he said.