“A privileged glimpse into their intellectual preoccupations...” Photograph by Dylan Buyskes, Onion Studio, Inc.
LETTER FROM THE DEAN Robert G. Shibley, FAIA, FAICP Intersight – a reflective journal on our disciplines, produced by and for the student – goes right to the heart of our school, brings to life its personality, and captures the culture of our community. Every year, I have the pleasure of holding in my hands the intellectual output of our students, laid out with their fresh perspectives. It is always powerfully rewarding, giving new meaning to why we are here as professors, staff, mentors and fellow knowledge-seekers. Intersight 19 is a compelling addition to the rich tradition of Intersight, a publication that dates back to 1990 when Steven B. Sample and Kathryn A. Brunkow endowed an annual initiative to chronicle the pedagogy and life of the school. Now a catalog of 19 volumes, it is an inspiring representation of the school’s intellectual currents across three decades. In the following pages, editor Micaela Barker, our 2016-17 Brunkow Fellow and a 2017 graduate of our MArch and MUP programs, brings us the voice of the student through a beautifully stitched narrative of essays, interviews, drawings and images. It’s a privileged glimpse into their intellectual preoccupations, the intricacies of their design and making processes, their creative struggles – and discoveries – and the richness of their experiences outside the studio. It’s raw at times. It’s funny at others. It’s authentic and refreshing throughout. You will be heartened by the two students who extract the positive out of a failed design. Their full-size boat, an experiment with bent wood that informed their design of a building, ultimately sank in the studio’s race in the Niagara River (as did several others). “I feel more rewarded with what we came up with than I would have felt winning the race with a different boat,” says one of the students. “We all worked so well together and the end product was well worth the challenges and frustration.” You will be impressed by the creative task-sharing a group of planning, architecture and engineering students employed to sift field data and develop culturally-sensitive recommendations for a sanitation plan for a village in Kerala, India.