COVER LETTER

Hello BRIC team,

My name is Danielle Hawkins, and I am currently finishing my last semester as a graduate student in the 3-year Master of Architecture program at the University of Idaho where I have studied and created architectural projects from abstract concepts to detailed construction and design documents.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the urge to create. Some of my earliest memories are sketching my plastic childhood tea set on a bright blue Playskool chalkboard easel. Throughout the years, my goals, my careers, and my intentions all have meandered the path of ‘artist.’

In high school I began working as a staff writer and photographer at my local newspaper, and through the kindness of my colleagues, learned newspaper layout and graphic design, which has spurred a life-long love of learning digital design, typography, magazine and newspaper layout and publishing in general.

While my undergraduate degree was in Recreation and Leisure Studies at The University of Georgia, I used my graphic design skills to create logos and marketing materials for our program, and then when I went to work at summer camps across the US and abroad, I used my sketching skills to demonstrate concepts and relate ideas to my students. After almost ten years in the camping industry, I worked as the Recreation Supervisor at The Ritz-Carlton, Reynolds, where I programmed and created group activities and personalized products and crafts for my campers and corporate clients alike. I created a digital menu for these activities as a sales and marketing tool to present to multi-million dollar companies.

Most recently, before I moved to Idaho for school, I was the primary designer for a small publishing company in my home state of Georgia. I was in charge of all in-house advertising, weekly newspaper design and the art director of the quarterly magazine Lake Oconee Living , which I am still designing remotely.

However, over the last few years, I have felt a pull to simply do more to protect and nurture our world because I was so involved in environmental education for so long, and that’s how I landed in the field of architecture. There are so many opportunities to create with sustainable materials, use daylighting schemes to reduce energy costs, thoughtfully plan urban spaces for walkability and wellbeing of the residents, and finally educate other architects, contractors and engineers to do the same.

I look forward to expanding my knowledge of architecture while working at a firm that values collaboration across all levels of the design team and the community partners, plus holds values like diversity and sustainability in such high esteem, which I think BRIC does so wonderfully.

architecture bootcamp / summer 2020

Beginning my architectural journey in the midst of a pandemic resulted in a summer spent working in solitude through a program meant to engage and connect new students to each other, their new professors and architecture as a whole.

The summer bootcamp program held over Zoom was a challenging experience, but my favorite project to result from the hot and quiet summer was this foundobject space station.

Before the programming was given, we were asked to create line drawings of 20 different mood-evoking words, then fold 20 single slivers of paper based on our drawings and finally pick the three most interesting. I chose transcendent, tranquil and venture which helped inform the programming of our space station - my creation resulting in a spa-station from the found-object saving my sanity - a tower fan.

cross laminated timber competition / spring 2021

This master planning project had four goals - to connect the Port of Beirut to the wider community, both physically and aesthetically, enhance and add to existing port attractions and amenities to both rejuvenate Beirut’s tourism industry and create enjoyable spaces for the community and visitors alike, utilize multiple scales of sustainable and regenerative design to help mitigate existing environmental issues within and around the site, and finally to memorialize the explosion and its effects through reusing on-site materials to create spaces that show peace can emerge from even the most turbulent times. drawings not to scale

The Micro McCall project sought to solve the lack of connection on multiple levels between shortterm seasonal staff and residents of the mixeduse building, long-term community members and tourists of the thrill-seeker vacation area.

The first level of the building is designed to allow for foot traffic through the site and between the two distinct commercial areas. Each programming space is flexible for different types of businesses as are the small, or micro, apartments on the upper levels.