Students Participate in Annual Laskey Charrette, “Pictures Are the Context”

Thirty-nine Sam Fox School undergraduate architecture students took part in the annual Laskey Charrette design competition earlier last month. An opportunity for second-year architecture students to work on collaborative teams, they were tasked with fabricating a photo of a room into a diorama.

This year’s theme, “Pictures Are the Context,” was shared in a kickoff lecture Feb. 16 by Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie of Zurich-based design practice Architecture Office. They were inspired by two quotes: “The more you look, the more you see. Supposedly,” from Leslie J. Laskey, namesake of the charrette; and “Working with existing pictures, like I do, you constantly think about the flood of images we are subjected to, and you want to figure out how you can make sense of it,” from Thomas Demand.

A German artist, Demand is well-known for constructing paper models and photographing them, collecting imagery along the way. “For Demand, the pictures are the context,” McIntosh and Louie shared, “the photography depicts the rooms that are built from the image.”

For the charrette, students explored Demand’s style forwards and backwards. Beginning with a photo of a room, they first built a diorama of the photo. Once complete, they photographed the diorama. McIntosh and Louie suggested displaying the three parts of the work side-by-side, so that “the more you look, the more you see…they are models for observing and studying new ways of seeing the room.”

First prize went to the team of Frances Bobbitt, Harry Park, and Ignatius Whitworth. The team of Grace Choi, Juke Jasso, Marcus Morehead, and Toni Taylor took second place. Journee Adams, Holy Kim, Camden Maggard, and Katherine Xiao place third in the competition.

The Laskey Charrette honors the late Professor Emeritus Leslie J. Laskey and his singular approach to design education during his 35-year tenure at WashU. The charrette is sponsored annually by Studio L in collaboration with the College of Architecture.