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Interior Design Reviews Hosted in Design Firms

Art & Design, Interior Design

In fall 2018, LSU interior design students had the opportunity to present the semester’s projects for review by design professionals, in their office locations throughout Louisiana. Presenting in a real-life office setting was an invaluable experience for the students, said School of Interior Design Director Marsha Cuddeback.

Students in associate professor Kelly Greeson’s class presented at the office of architecture firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple (EDR) in New Orleans. “I think it was a great experience for the students to present in a new and professional context that’s quite different from what they are accustomed to in class,” Greeson said, noting that the professional reviewers challenged the students in helpful ways.

“The diversity of the reviewers also made for some interesting discussions,” he said. “EDR had prearranged three to four critiques for each of the four hours of the presentations, which meant there was a good deal of exposure to different professionals with different professional and academic backgrounds.”

“I absolutely loved presenting at the architecture and interiors office of Eskew+Dumez+Ripple in New Orleans,” BID candidate Ilana Springer said. “It was a great experience to present at such a prestigious firm. We were able to present in a different and professional context compared to our past reviews, which was really exciting and rewarding.”

Smiling interior designers in office

LSU interior design at CDI Solutions

Associate professor Phillip Tebbutt’s class presented at CDI Solutions, an interior design firm in Baton Rouge. “Having the opportunity to present for an off campus review made what I worked for in my classes that much more real and exciting to [imagine] my future career,” said Brannon Hardy, BID candidate.

BID candidate Caitlin Bella was one of the students that presented at Frost-Barber, a Steelcase furniture dealer. She said the experience presenting to design professionals outside of LSU was markedly different than previous reviews, and more true to reality in design careers.

“When we present our designs on campus, our professors are completely aware of/know the requirements of the assignment and have been involved in the design process from the start,” she said. “Presenting to Frost-Barber provided a more real life scenario in which we were presenting to ‘clients’ who had no information on what the project was or what it entailed, so we had to explain to them where we got our inspiration from, how our design evolved and its purpose and then, most importantly, sell them on our design.”

Presenting to unfamiliar “clients” was initially nerve-wracking for many students, but ultimately positive. “I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into it, but as soon as we were cheerfully greeted by Doug and his team, I felt more relaxed,” she shared. “Doug and his whole team were such gracious hosts. They invited us to make ourselves at home and gave us access to their entire firm. We were encouraged to test out the furniture in their showroom, which was fun.”

“We also got a tour of the office, which was really interesting!” Ilana shared. “We got the chance to be critiqued by not only professionals from EDR, but also professionals from other prestigious design and architecture firms in New Orleans. The feedback we received from the different professionals was very beneficial and helpful. Overall, I loved getting out of the studio and the fourth floor of the Design Building and traveling to New Orleans to be reviewed by professionals. It was an amazing experience.”

 

Tipton Associates Travel Award – Call for Submissions

Art & Design, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design, Architecture, , , , , , ,

tipton associates travel award

Need extra money for travel?

Enter the annual Tipton Associates Travel Award competition by February 28, 2020, for a chance to win $1,700 to be used for travel within a university-approved study abroad program during the 2020-21 academic year. Application criteria, requirements, and timeline details are provided below.

Tipton Associates is a Baton Rouge based architecture, interiors, and planning firm with a 130-year history of enhancing the quality of life for individuals and communities through its emphasis on excellent design.

Led by LSU School of Architecture alumnus Ken Tipton, BArch 1981, the firm has an interdisciplinary focus; projects are about partnerships and working together with smart people to implement a shared vision. The 30 people in the Baton Rouge office approach assignments in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams that include specialists in architecture, interior design, urban planning, and landscape architecture as well as LEED Accredited Professionals. The team is the core of everything done at Tipton Associates.

In this vein, Tipton Associates wanted their firm’s gift to represent their philosophy of interdisciplinary work, which is why students from any design discipline at the LSU College of Art & Design are encouraged to submit an application for the Tipton Associates Travel Award.

Applicant Criteria

  • Full-time, rising fourth- and fifth-year BArch and BLA students as well as junior- and senior-level BID students who have a 2.5 or higher GPA may apply.
  • Full-time MArch and MLA students who have a 2.5 or higher GPA may apply.
  • Student must use the award for travel in the 2019-20 academic year. Students graduating in May or August 2019 are not eligible for this award.

Application Requirements

  • Submit a portfolio of up to 25 8×10 pages of your work. Your portfolio may be one project or many; we are looking for the best representation of you and your work.
  • Submit a brief letter, 750 words or less, of how you intend to use the funds and how you imagine the travel will impact your studies.
  • All applications should be submitted digitally in PDF format. File should not exceed 20MB and should be emailed with the subject line “Tipton Associates Travel Award” to adsn@lsu.edu.

Application Timeline

  • Call for entries are open as of November 16, 2019.
  • All applications must be submitted by midnight, February 28, 2020.
  • A panel of industry professionals representing each discipline—architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture—will judge the submissions and select a winner by April 30, 2020.
  • All applicants will be informed of the status of their application no later than May 4, 2020.
  • The winning student will be awarded $1,700 stipend to be used for travel during the summer 2020, fall 2020, or spring 2021 semesters.

If you have any questions about eligibility for the scholarship or how to apply, email cluke@lsufoundation.org.

Need ideas on where to go? The LSU College of Art & Design offers several Academic Programs Abroad, including a full semester in Rome and intersession programs in China, South Africa, Ireland, and more! Visit Academic Programs Abroad for more information.

View more LSU College of Art & Design scholarship & award opportunities.

Tom Sofranko’s Essay Published in New Book Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design

Art & Design, Publications, Architecture, Faculty, Doctor of Design

Tom Sofranko“Blurry Target,” an essay by Tom Sofranko, College of Art & Design associate dean of academics, was published in the recently released book Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design (Routledge 2018).

The chapter includes topics “Progenitors of Creativity in Beginning Design” and “Resolving a Pedagogy of Creativity and Structure.”

“Creativity as a pedagogical component of the design studio can confound even the most experienced instructor: we know it’s there but are often challenged to identify its specific components or its operation,” Sofranko writes.

With chapters written by design instructors, Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design addresses issues that contribute to deficiencies in teaching creativity in contemporary design programs.

Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design Book Cover“Where traditional pedagogies displace creative thinking by placing conceptual abstractions above direct experiential engagement, the approaches presented in this book set forth alternative pedagogies that mitigate student fears and misconceptions to reveal the potency of authentic encounters for initiating creative transformational development,” Routledge stated.

These chapters challenge design pedagogy to address such issues as the spatial body, phenomenological thinking, making as process, direct material engagement and its temporal challenges, creative decision-making and the wickedness of design, and the openness of the creative design problem. In doing so, this book sets out to give greater depth to first design experiences and more effectively enable the breadth and depth of the teacher–student relationship as a means of helping your students develop the capacity for long-term self-transformation.

Sofranko is a professor of the LSU School of Architecture and the associate dean of academics of the LSU College of Art & Design. He served as the interim director of the School of Architecture for four years and has been at LSU since 1992. Sofranko received his Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture from Kent State University. Prior to his arrival at LSU, he worked professionally in Cleveland, Ohio.

His interest in the curriculum and the structure of the school as well as the geography of the region led him to LSU. He is a full member of the graduate faculty and primarily teaches design studios in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. His research has been a combination of architectural design projects and scholarly papers with a focus on beginning design as well as popular cultural and architecture as image. He has been involved with the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student for over 20 years. Most recently his research has focused on the efficacy of techniques for recruiting and retention of students in design. He is credited with starting the school’s Architecture & Design Summer Camp for high school students and is interested in using the camp as a tool for recruiting minority students.

Three Landscape Architecture Alumni made ASLA Fellows

Landscape Architecture

Three Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture alumni were elevated to 2018 Fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

Tim BairdTim Baird (BLA ’72), of Cornell University, received his nomination from the Council of Fellows Executive Committee.

“Drawing on the lessons gleaned from an extraordinarily distinguished multi-faceted career, including practice at internationally recognized firms and teaching at Cornell, Penn State and Texas Tech, Baird has imparted both theoretical and practical wisdom to the next generation of landscape architects, as both mentor and exemplar,” ASLA stated. “Because of his extraordinary work as a thought leader, innovator, researcher and accomplished practitioner, he has provided his students with both a model to follow and the knowledge and wisdom to become highly regarded professionals in their own right. His studios are among his many academic innovations and now include interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and landscape architecture students. Baird’s service for eight years as a devoted member of the Flight 93 National Memorial Task Force, and as manager of the international memorial design competition, reveals a selfless dedication to the highest ideals of the profession and sets an extraordinary example for his students and the entire landscape architecture community.”

George StanzialeGeorge Stanziale (BLA ’76) is a senior vice president and director of the Design Studio at Stewart, an engineering, design, and planning firm with locations in Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

“Throughout his career, Stanziale has applied the landscape architecture design approach to every aspect of leadership and management, a mindset he has vigorously employed in the transformation of a traditional engineering firm into its current form as a highly integrated force of 200 multidisciplinary professionals. Stanziale has pioneered and refined a multidisciplinary, consensus-based approach to design that has fundamentally transformed the landscape architecture profession in North Carolina. His volunteer leadership includes the establishment of ULI Carolinas, which now supports more than 700 members, and the transformation of North Carolina State University’s landscape architecture curriculum into one that balances insightful design with pragmatic professionalism. By bringing together diverse minds and professions and actively engaging with the people of his state, Stanziale has unleashed the power of landscape architecture and placed it at the center of the transformation of his community.”

James WescoatJim Wescoat (BLA ’76), Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, is a geographer, hydrologist, historian, educator, and landscape architect who bridges the worlds of scholarship and practice.

Wescoat’s contributions include leadership in addressing pressing environmental problems around the world, particularly those related to water. He is at the top of two fields: the history and conservation of Islamic gardens and large scale water management and policy. Water has been the unifying theme of his work, especially in the study of water-conserving design across widely varying scales, regions and cultures around the world. He contends that water is a to a landscape as energy is to buildings and only by carefully scrutinizing how water is distributed throughout society can we understand whether our environmental plans are sustainable. According to ASLA, “Wescoat has had, and will have, a profound effect on the profession, compelling landscape architects everywhere to think more deeply about structures in geographic and environmental terms and incorporate insights into how societies draw on local water supplies into their designs.”

Theo Bargiotas Wins Graduate Art Prize

Art & Design, Honors & Awards, Publicity, Doctor of Design, ,
Man with paintings

Theo Bargiotas in his studio

DDES candidate Theodoros “Theo” Bargiotas received the ARTIQ Graduate Art Prize 2018 for his painting “Untitled,” awarded in London in November 2018. A first-year student in the Doctor of Design in Cultural Preservation program, Theo’s doctoral research explores dystopian concepts through a body of oil paintings.

Theo commented on his win, “It is truly a pleasure to be a part of The Graduate Art Prize. Winning enables my cosmology to be communicated to an audience outside of the strictly academic world, which is a necessary process for artist and audience. All in all, winning a prize is of course enjoyable but the most significant aspect is that the work gets seen. The bigger the prize, the greater the audience, and this is what pleases me.”

Theo’s painting procedure and technique is a result of researching early modern European art, especially Dutch and Flemish Renaissance/Baroque painting. He creates his own oil painting mediums, having thoroughly researched recipes from the Old Masters and contemporary conservators. “This alchemistic approach gives me a feeling of continuation of a tradition beginning 30,000 years ago in the caves of Chauvet where my predecessors portrayed their charcoal impressions of the world around them,” he stated.

The piece “Untitled” was selected by ARTIQ along with 23 artist finalists, and nominated by online voters.

Painting of man reading book

“Untitled” by Theo Bargiotas

“We are fragile creatures constantly trying to interpret pieces of truth in the wilderness,” Theo shared. “A perceptive artist’s role is to recognize these little fragments of truth and depict them. The artist should capture that dream moment that most people suspect exists, but only s/he can immortalize and portray. This is a crucial mission for the painter today; trying to detect the sublime and spiritual in everyday gestures and circumstances, probing the dark side of the moon, and showing it to humanity in the form of a picture, a painting.”

He studied for his MFA at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where he achieved a Distinction under the tutelage of Dr. John Cussans and “leading light of the contemporary art world,” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

ARTIQ is a market leading art consultancy based in London, UK. The Graduate Art Prize is awarded annually to selected art students who are invited to display their nominated work in a group exhibition and exclusive private viewing event, where the winners are announced. The event was attended by over 200 attendees, including corporate collectors, art patrons, journalists and buyers.

The prize includes a contract with ARTIQ, a £2000 cash prize from long-time sponsor and supporter, Herbert Smith Freehills, who also hosted the awards ceremony and a £500 art voucher from the sponsor Atlantis Art Supplies.

Learn more about the Doctor of Design in Cultural Preservation Program.

 

Malcolm McClay’s Swimming to Inishkeel Comes to LSU

Art & Design, Galleries, Events, Art, Sculpture, Exhibitions, Faculty, Doctor of Design, ,

Malcolm McClayArt professor Malcolm McClay’s exhibition Swimming to Inishkeel, which debuted in Donegal, Ireland in early 2018, opened at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge November 1. Swimming to Inishkeel is a body of work that consists of the static and kinetic sculpture, photography, film and performance. The exhibition features video installations of McClay’s performance art, conducted in the tides between the island of Inishkeel and the coast of Ireland, and presents recent multi-media and sculptural work.

Swimming to Inishkeel presents recent multi-media, sculptural, and performance work by Professor McClay. While McClay’s earlier work engaged the political and the external, this body of work turns sharply inward to the spiritual and meditative. His most recent durational performance Chasing the Invisible meditates on his daily swims to Inishkeel, an island off the coast of Donegal, Ireland. While there, McClay swims two hundred fifty meters from the shore to the island of Inishkeel and back each day. Through these durational, rhythmic exertions, McClay finds focus—the “thin space.”

“In the Celtic tradition a thin place is the name given to a place where the visible and invisible worlds touch or are at their closest, a space where the veil between the temporal and celestial worlds has grown thin,” McClay shared. “For me, Inishkeel is such a place…The coldness and clarity of the water, the stillness and unchanging nature of the landscape bring me to a place where I am more alive and connected than at any other time.”

Since arriving at LSU’s School of Art in 2003, McClay has become a dedicated member of the artistic community at LSU and in New Orleans, where he is a founding member of the artist-run Good Children Gallery. His artistic and teaching practice ranges across sculpture, installation, and performance and demonstrates a strong commitment to community organizing and equal commitment to teaching, which manifests most fully in his immersive Art in Ireland Summer Program for LSU School of Art students.

This exhibition is a collaboration between the LSU School of Art and the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, where it was on view January–March, 2018.

About Professor McClay

Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and raised in Donegal, Ireland, Malcolm McClay studied at the University of Ulster in Belfast, where he received a BA with honors in three-dimensional design. He earned an MA in sculpture from New Mexico State University and an MFA in sculpture and performance from Ohio State University. There he co-founded the performance company Crisus. For the next 10 years at Crisus, he wrote, produced, and toured large-scale multimedia performances throughout the US and abroad. In 1999, McClay moved away from performance to concentrate on interactive installation and kinetic sculpture. He moved from San Francisco to Louisiana in 2002 and joined the faculty of the LSU School of Art in the fall of 2003. McClay typically spends 10 months of the year in the US and two months in Ireland, and he regularly exhibits and curates throughout the US and Europe. In 2013, McClay returned to performance with Ekstasis, a 36-hour performance at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, where he is a founding member.

Swimming to Inishkeel will be on display at the LSU Museum of Art November 1, 2018–February 10, 2019. A reception was held Thursday, November 1 at 6 p.m.