Architecture, art and interior design students will be taking the Mississippi State campus layout into their own hands this week.
Students from the College of Architecture, Art and Design will meet in the Sky Deck on the east side of Davis Wade Stadium at 5 p.m. Wednesday for the introduction of “You Are Here,” a charrette that will allow students to work in multidisciplinary teams to find solutions to site problems around campus.
The project encourages students to rethink, remake and “reimagine” the MSU campus. Approximately 400 students will work in teams on 30 sites to develop solutions for some key areas around campus.
“MSU is not finished,” art professor Brent Funderburk said. “We think that we (the college) have something to offer.”
“A charrette is a brainstorming session to quickly generate design ideas,” architecture professor Leah Faulk said.
Faulk said charrettes are based on the idea that the participants have a limited amount of time to get ideas.
The charrette will last until Saturday evening when students will display their designs in the Sky Deck with a collegewide party following.
At the party, students of selected teams will be given monetary prizes for design and for team costumes.
Each group of 10 to 12 students, some from each of the three disciplines within the college, will be headed by one faculty member and will receive a kit to help them begin designing.
“No one will know what is in the kit. Faculty members will not even know,” Funderburk said.
The charrette organizing committee members, who are faculty from each program in the college, say they think this is an important event for the newly-formed College of Architecture, Art and Design.
“As a newly formed entity, we have a voice,” architecture professor Kimberly Brown said.
“Right now, we are talking to each other,” Funderburk said. “We are getting to know each other and learning something that we can take back to the classroom.”
Faculty members also said this event is unprecented on campus.
“We are throwing together unlikely partners,” Funderburk said of the students from the three separate disciplines.
“Through a mixture of hard work and fun we can generate something that can be beneficial to us and to the university.”