Scott BresslerWashington University Professor of Architecture Peter MacKeith recently received a national award for the work done in his studio last year, entitled “Lighthouses: Adventures on the Mississippi.”
MacKeith said that the reward was a testimony to the commitment of the students in his studio class, who produced the award-winning piece under his direction. MacKeith, who also serves as an associate dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, taught 15 undergraduates during the spring 2007 semester.
“It was great to go and receive the reward, but the studio is a collective effort and the students really made the semester sing,” he said. “They entered into it with enthusiasm, energy and dedication.”
The award, titled the Creative Achievement Award, is one of three given by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) to recognize advancements in architectural education.
The students designed observation structures for specific sites along the Mississippi River where other rivers intersected it between St. Louis and Memphis. Each student researched a site’s geography, its history and the people in the area.
MacKeith encouraged his students to “go spend time talking to people, eating in restaurants and smelling the air” so that their structure would fit in with their assigned locations.
Senior John Kleinschmidt’s site was at the meeting point of the Mississippi and Big Muddy rivers. The confluence did not strike him as interesting at first, but through his research, he saw that it was a rich site.
“You might pass by it on the highway and not think twice, but once you start to probe the history of the place, you start to see issues that can drive the design of the architecture,” Kleinschmidt said. “There were lots of things to respond to.”
Kleinschmidt’s design for “Lighthouses: Adventures on the Mississippi” was a tall tower that marked the heights of past floods.
“The metaphor of lighthouses is open-ended, as all good metaphors are,” MacKeith said. “It allowed the students to develop their interests and engage issues of light, density and weight.”
Students were encouraged to consider the ecology of their site’s landscape and to work in an environmentally-friendly approach. Kleinschmidt’s tower design, for example, was meant to challenge people to consider the effects of agriculture on the land.
“My analogy is that farming is to the land as a levee is to a river,” he said. “The giant farms can have negative as well as positive impacts, and when flooding happens, it happens really badly. Flooding has been getting worse over the years, so people going up the tower would come to the realization that the structure isn’t tall enough to mark future floods if waters keep getting higher.”
The studio’s teaching assistant, Aaron Senne, saw the call for entries in Sept. 2007 and put together the application materials for the ACSA. The awards are given out each spring, and MacKeith said he was “more or less surprised” when he found out about the results.
“It was an honor to receive the certificate in Houston, but this is because of a really energetic teaching assistant who was aware and pulled it all together,” MacKeith said. “I can’t thank the students enough-it was a very good semester. So we’ve had a couple of meals together and kept talking.”
MacKeith sees many possible directions for future projects. For instance, he is interested in sacred spaces and the way light conditions bring people to larger awareness.
Another project he is considering involves asking students to imagine working on behalf of the U.S. government, designing a pavilion for a world’s fair that represents national character through architecture.
“I’m always seeking these kinds of strong metaphors that can be inspiring to design students,” MacKeith said.