Studio Projects

Residents of Brownwood, Texas had a chance last fall to shape their city’s future by participating in a survey developed by Master of Urban Planning students at Texas A&M, part of a collaboration with the city’s officials to update its master plan.

Staff at the Texas A&M College of Architecture Digital Fabrication Facility, aka Architecture Ranch, helped engineering students build a hybrid race car that won first place in a contest at a NASCAR track in New Hampshire. The car's carbon fiber body panels were fabricated on the CNC mill.

Gabriel Esquivel, professor of architecture at Texas A&M, collaborated with students at Monterrey Tech to create “Diaphanus,” an architectural installation that resembles a bouquet with laser-cut polypropylene flowers that provides a 1,350-square-foot rainwater collection surface.

A July 7, 2011 CNN story on Texas colonias highlights recent and ongoing efforts led by the College of Architecture aimed at enhancing the quality of life in these impoverished border communities, many of which lack basic necessities such as potable water, electricity and sewer systems.

Environmental design students worked alongside residents of Las Lomas, a South Texas colonia, on projects aimed at improving the quality of life in the border community. Colonias leaders asked students to create after-school activities and identify ways to raise funds for community center staffing.

First-year environmental design students at Texas A&M designed a high-density, mixed-use housing cluster with “green” elements for a theoretical site in College Station during a spring 2011 studio led by Phillip Tabb, professor of architecture.

Undergraduate visualization students capped their spring 2011 semester with an exhibition featuring their class projects in the Langford B Exhibit Hall and a screening of time-based work in the Preston Geren Auditorium.

The college's Azimuth coffee shop has gained a bold, new look from a permanent installation designed by Elena Manferdini, principal of a Los Angeles firm specializing in computer-aided design of exotic forms. The structure was fabricated by students at the college's Digital Fabrication Facility.

A menagerie of phantasmal creatures realized in papier-mâché by first-year Texas A&M visualization students populated the Viz 106 design studios on the third floor of the Langford C building as the spring 2011 semester drew to an end.

As part of an international design experiment in social media, students in a design studio joined architecture students from around the globe for a collaboration with top Italian designers that culminated in an April 15 exhibit at the renowned Milan Design Fair in Milan, Italy.

Students developed housing prototypes with designers from two acclaimed firms — Wonnie Ickx and Carlos Bedoya, founding members of Mexico City-based PRODUCTORA, and Tom Wiscombe, principal of the L. A. firm EMERGENT — in the inaugural Mitchell Lab Visiting Designer Program.

Students in a Texas A&M architecture-for-health design studio collaborated with the university's Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture to develop design concepts for Rehab Nova, a new multipurpose health training and agriculture facility to be located in Africa's newest country, South Sudan.

Landscape architecture students could begin work with professional landscape designers as early as Fall 2011 in the construction phase of Circuit of the Americas, a $400 million, 1,100 acre motor sports race track, concert venue and conference center in Austin.

Texas A&M students studying abroad in Bonn, Germany during the fall 2010 semester impressed the city’s mayor and staff with their presentations of a master plan for a 10-kilometer redevelopment along the Rhine River. A published portfolio of the students' work can be viewed online in PDF format.

Dining tables at an upcoming International Association of Lighting Designers fund-raising event will be adorned with innovative light centerpieces made by students at the University of Oregon under the direction of visiting Baker Chair Jill Mulholland, a lecturer at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.