Door/Window/Stair project is a rite of passage for design students

October 20, 2009
For over a decade, Design 3 students have taken their models that look something like miniature houses and stood in the atrium of the Architecture building, displaying their own projects and examining the work that had been their classmates’ lives for the past week or two.

This annual congregation which has attained near mythic status is known as the Door/Window/Stair project; a chance for students to design parts of a structure without dealing with the complexity of designing a full building. It is a challenging project which often becomes a part of the student’s pin-up or graduate school application.

According to assistant professor and studio coordinator Mark McGlothlin, it is constantly evolving, but has continued to be a success year after year.

“It picks up the lessons from their first year and builds on that,” McGlothlin said. “We give them certain elements and they have to expand beyond that – essentially make ordinary things into something extraordinary.”

The heart of the project rests on the use of space while incorporating the elements of doors, windows and stairs.

McGlothlin said that out of the 120 models, the best projects are exquisitely crafted, but more importantly are very spatial and contain a visible hierarchy.

“The best ones you can imagine yourself walking or climbing through,” McGlothlin said. “Also, I think it becomes evident in the model itself rather than the student having to stand there and explain what they’re doing with it.”

McGlothlin teaches one of the seven Design 3 sections, and introduced the project to his class by showing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”

“You have to find something to get the students to move and make things, and then pick up on the spatial possibilities,” he said. Other professors utilized different techniques, but all with the same goal in mind.

An architecture student in McGlothlin’s section, Danielle Reyes created her project out of plywood and Plexiglas. She worked on it for eight school days, as well as during weekends.

“I wasn’t happy with it until about 1 a.m. when I made some decisions and moves that pulled it together,” Reyes said. “It’s all about the details.”

Reyes recalls watching “Rear Window.”

“We analyzed scenes from the movie based on spatial relationships,” Reyes said. “It’s all about the view between the subject and object.”

The class then created different spaces that related to scenes or rooms in the movie, and made their designs based on those.

Reyes said that coming up with the core of the project was easy for her; the hard parts were working at a 3/8 inch scale and dealing with the details.

“We were trying to take abstract ideas and turn them into something concrete,” she said.

Architecture student Alex Hilbert created his project out of Plexiglas, wood and styrene. He was very pleased with his original mock-up, and decided to expand it into his final project.

“I thought it would be easier, but it turned out to be harder,” Hilbert said.

Like Reyes, Hilbert worked on his project until the very last minute, but after all the worrying, he was pleased with how it turned out.

“I learned a lot about how to enclose spaces and make overhead conditions react to what’s below them,” Hilbert said.

McGlothlin said that Door/Window/Stair is always an exciting project.

“It has built up a reputation in the student body. They all know it’s coming, and they look at what was done the previous year,” he said.

“The students invest a lot of time into it. It’s a chance for them to gain more experience and build up confidence.”

According to Reyes, that is exactly what happened.

“It was one of those light bulb moments for me. Something clicked. I understand space rather than the object, and I now understand breaking down the scale.”