High School Design Team
Bartholomew County School Corporation and Indiana University
High School students from Bartholomew County School Corporation “C4 Columbus Area Career Connection” including Brown, Bartholomew, Jackson, and Decatur Counties in Indiana. In coordination with instructor Darin Johnson.
Advised by Indiana University’s Sidney and Lois Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design professor Spencer Steenblik.
R. Spencer Steenblik
R. Spencer Steenblik is a registered architect in New York and has spent 20 years helping people optimize their spaces. His work blends vernacular and advanced digital processes through an equitable, interdisciplinary, and sustainable approach, creating urban intricacy and inspiring, interactive spaces. Steenblik has spoken globally at universities like MIT, Tongji, and Yonsei. He holds an academic role at Indiana University's Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, and previously at Pratt Institute, NJIT, CUNY, and Wenzhou-Kean University in China, among others. His practice, phi architecture φ, designs across scales for clients including Google and BYU. Steenblik has also influenced design at firms like Asymptote Architecture and Pelli Clarke Pelli. He holds a master's from SCI-Arc, with time at dieAngewandte.
Previous Installations by the High School Design Team
Machi
In Japanese, 街 (Machi) signifies a busy downtown area or main street, making the installation a perfect fit with the location on Washington Street. Whether you just got off of work or are taking a scenic stroll downtown, Machi is a space for all. Constructed of over 1,000 linear feet of steel tubing, Machi measures 64 feet in width and 53 feet deep. A large group space is defined within its overall boundaries while several small, intimate spaces are created around its perimeter.
Machi contains moveable chairs, tables, and more that allow every person to customize their own gathering space as they imagine it to be. Machi also integrates a multi-level canopy that grants opportunities for making art, taking selfies, or gathering under shade. The overall goal of Machi was to make a space that feels welcoming and secure for all.
Tunnel Vision
Tunnel Vision looks at Columbus as a middle city and how it might grow. Rivers are the foundation of middle cities. Waterways shape how cities are formed and developed over time. Just as rivers flow along a path, the installation’s geodesic tunnel presents a linear experience that transports visitors through history.
Tunnel Vision offers a glimpse of the past, present, and future of architecture in Columbus. Visitors follow the river—represented in colored panels that tell a story of how Columbus revolutionized modern architecture. As visitors flow through the tunnel, informational videos, viewable by QR codes, teach guests about Columbus architecture. The city is also expanding; a final video speculates on future changes to the city.
DENCITY
Over six consecutive days in September 2020, 110 architecture students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee circumnavigated Milwaukee’s boundary on foot, by bike, and by car to experience firsthand how the city both affects and is affected by race, class, and climate change. The studio, Walk the Line, functioned as a traveling repository and production line operating from the periphery of the city to survey the intersection between land, the human body, and human activity. By traveling 110 miles around the outermost edge of Milwaukee without ever crossing the imaginary line enclosing it, students understood the pervasive effects of environmental racism as issues that they could no longer ignore. Students cataloged their observations through field diaries and narrative maps, reflected on those annotations with people they met along the way and online, and collectively designed and built 34 site-specific interventions in response. The grass social distancing machine was made in collaboration with Natalie Kuehl.
Between the Threads
With its bright colors and walls that gently vibrate in the breeze, Between the Threads is meant to be playful and inviting. The work is pieced together by ten-foot-high steel frames wrapped in plastic lacing string. The panels create a maze for viewers, who slowly become wrapped by color while still remaining able to see and be seen between the threads. The bright colors were inspired by the work of Alexander Girard, whose vivid work is present throughout Columbus. Acknowledging the white scaffolding and bold colors of the neighboring AT&T Switching Center, the piece contrasts starkly with the colorless, flat walls of the Historic Post Office.