2024–25 University Design Research Fellows
Drawing on the playful work of Alexander Girard, this multi-story dollhouse presents a visual assemblage of Columbus’ architectural legacy. Alongside his well-known textiles, Girard created a three-story dollhouse for the Miller House and Garden in creative exchange with Tunsi Girard, Xenia Miller, and Eero Saarinen. Colorful dolls inhabit the Miller’s dollhouse interiors, and a nearby carpet illustrates the family’s stories, arranging icons that recall different events that shape their collective identity.
Columbus is an architectural archive, its buildings spatially arrayed throughout the city. Yet, its significant interiors remain hidden as privatized spaces or are less well-known than their exteriors. This dollhouse turns the city’s architecture inside out, revealing its interiors. New dolls, designed by Columbus’s youth and painted by their counterparts in St. Louis, animate the dollhouse, representing the city’s diverse inhabitants.
A terraced playground, recalling Girard’s conversation pit, surrounds the dollhouse, allowing young visitors to ascend and better view the upper levels. Like Girard’s carpet, the design incorporates Columbus’s community stories, weaving the city’s unique and varied identities into the project. This interactive installation invites imagination and discovery, reflecting Columbus’ multiplicitous collective identity, and offers a playful way to engage with its architectural history.
View of the World from Indiana highlights how the American Midwest has long served as an intrinsic, yet under-recognized, infrastructure for a coastal discipline. With the highest concentration of architecture fellowships in the United States, the region has often been perceived as a place scholars go ‘out’ to in their early careers before returning to the coast. Yet, with 44 schools of architecture, 19 fellowships, and several internationally acclaimed cultural institutions—such as the Walker Art Center and Graham Foundation—the “Flyover States” are unquestionably a space of emergence.
The installation comprises twelve “bathtub Madonnas”—one for each Midwestern state—that pay homage to the area’s folk art practices and enshrine a forgotten local building whose lineage can be traced back to canonical artworks. Above these tubs, a sign reading “NOTHING TO SEE HERE,” designed to be seen from passing planes, amplifies the region’s overlooked status in contemporary architectural discourse. Through humor, irony, and historical reflection, the project reclaims the Midwest’s place in the conversation, reminding us that to dismiss it as empty or uninteresting is to overlook a critical hub of architectural pedagogy, practice, and progress.
Pool/Side introduces a shallow pool and elevated seating platform as both infrastructure and socio-cultural artifact at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library Plaza. Drawing inspiration from modernist principles, the project acknowledges the deeper social histories embedded in architectural facades and building materials. This installation reimagines key elements of modern architecture—reflection pools, sunken courtyards, conversation pits, and plinths—as tools for exploring themes of resilience, cultural identity, and exclusion.
As a space for gathering, rest, performance, play, and reflection, Pool/Side seeks to reclaim these spatial typologies through a lens of inclusivity, imagination, and historical acknowledgment. It challenges visitors to reconsider the boundaries of public spaces and adequacy of infrastructure.
As it turns out, the little grey building across Lafayette Ave from the Bartholomew County Historical Society is perhaps the lone monument to the massive railroad that once cut diagonally through the center of town. The First Christian Church now stands over a former locomotive turntable that was the center of locomotive action. Horse stables, corn cribs, wheat elevators, ice sheds, coal bunkers, and huge lumber stockpiles once crowded along the tracksides—an industrial cityscape now vanished.
Between the 1890s and the 1940s, Columbus transformed from a town that relied on horses and trains to the iconic Midcentury Modern car-centric city we know now. But behind the iconic image, the past still lingers, along with a less obvious present. The automotive industry, Amazon distribution centers, and big agriculture—spaces that move vast quantities of material—all lie just beyond the city limits. What is The Steel Horsie? Maybe it’s a train trestle or bridge, standing parallel to the trackbed? Or is it a giant draughthorse that wandered off in search of its lost stable? Evoking the lost infrastructure of the past, the Horsie is made of the pieces of the present infrastructure—borrowed bales of automotive scrap from Kroot’s and the City’s own signposts. Below are bales of hay and cardboard to sit over striped outlines of the buildings that were once there. Within the frame are artifacts of the past, recent and more distant—the old fiberglass panels from the First Christian Church Tower images of the buildings, places, and people connected to the railroad that once rumbled nearby. In the BCHS carriage house across the way, visitors can peek into peepholes in the shed door to catch glimpses of archival footage of Columbus before the mid-century, back to an earlier modernity.
Apart, Together is an urban cinema screen consisting of multiple colors, each capable of being chroma-keyed to display different images and films. Drawing from Columbus’ iconic architecture and the formal and experiential qualities of kinematic op art, the scenographic installation undulates to reveal forms and sightlines as one moves around the piece.
Running parallel to 4th Street, the screen establishes a new visual and spatial boundary to enclose Ovation Plaza. Embracing the Yes And theme, the Yes acknowledges the site's existing live public performances and its vision for outdoor film screenings. Meanwhile, the And takes shape as a hybrid physical-digital screen, designed to amplify content from our community partners, YES Cinema and the Lincoln-Central Neighborhood Family Center.
The multi-experiential installation celebrates the plurality of individual interests, sensibilities, and preferences of the Lincoln-Central Neighborhood and consolidates them within a shared civic space to allow Columbus’ residents to be Apart, Together.
The public schools in Columbus showcase the creativity of many influential voices in Modern Architecture by combining striking roof forms, materials, and landscapes. While these schools celebrate imagination, we acknowledge that the classroom remains largely unexplored. They continue to reflect the past, resembling a box with a teacher-led front and back, which has historically prevented students from all backgrounds from learning in a self-determined and empowering environment.
PUBLIC/SCHOOL/GROUNDS draws inspiration from the dynamic roofscapes of Columbus public schools to create a variety of colorful, hard, soft, and furry platforms that break the conventional boundaries of the classroom, fostering a sense of openness and spontaneity in educational environments. This installation experiments with new arrangements for learning spaces that incorporate materials and sounds from the classroom and schoolyard to engage multiple senses, encouraging students of all ages to learn in new reposes, clusters, and heights. This outdoor classroom has no back-row students or marker boards. Instead, they will discover nooks to learn together and from one another, promoting a student-led environment.
PUBLIC/SCHOOL/GROUNDS extends the legacy of architectural exploration in Columbus into the classroom to bolster creativity and curiosity.
