ARC 302, an architectural design studio class, is a collaborative design studio between the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) and the NC State College of Design. Taught in the spring by Jianxin Hu, an associate professor of architecture, this course gives students the opportunity to work on a real world project in the local community.

“In the months before the spring semester starts, I’ll talk to the Wake County facility and design group,” Hu said. “I would call them before Christmas and say ‘Okay, we’re getting ready to do this in January in the spring, do you have an appropriate project for us?’ and they always have one.”

Typically these projects are additions to an existing school, but one year the students designed an entire school for North Ridge Elementary, according to Hu. Once the Wake County facility and design group helps the studio identify a project to use, Hu would visit their office to talk in person about the site, the school and to get base drawings.

“For most of the projects, they [WCPSS] already hired an architect to build a design, so we’re concurrent with their actual design process,” Hu said. “Sometimes we’ll invite the actual professional designers into our studio and critique our students’ projects.”

The collaborative design studio has been held since 2013 and has since designed additions to five elementary schools. Over these five years, Elizabeth Sharpe and Sheri Green from the WCPSS supported the studio by identifying projects, preparing programs and arranging site visits.

In 2016 and 2017, students from the Department of Landscape Architecture joined the collaboration. Kofi Boone, an associate professor of landscape architecture, leads this recent collaboration on the landscape architecture side.

“For the past few years, the two departments have collaborated on site planning — determining and visualizing how to place and organize a building and a landscape together, and conceptual design — showing design opportunities for consideration by WCPSS for proposed WCPSS projects,” Boone said. “WCPSS selects the sites and Jianxin Hu and I have collaborated on this.”

These projects give students exposure to real world considerations and real clients. The first day of the project involves a visit to the site where students meet principals, teachers and WCPSS facility staff, as well as observe the school activities.

“They have multiple clients to work with,” Hu said. “They work with the Wake County School facility group, like Elizabeth Sharpe, and that’s a real client. Then they get to work with the users, which are the principals and teachers and students of a particular school.”

Working with people from other disciplines has also been a big learning experience for the students, according to Hu.

“In architecture we work with landscape architects, we work with mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, plumbing engineers, civil engineers so they need to have experience to be able to work with all these people from other disciplines because they have their own agenda and the collaboration is not always smooth,” Hu said.

There is often positive feedback from students for this short term project, according to Hu.

“In each class there have been plenty of ‘aha’ moments – considering the needs of parents, teachers, kids, considering the practicalities of arrival and drop off, and I think most importantly, thinking of the landscape and not just the building as a place where people can learn and a place that has opportunities to extend the educational mission and add value,” Boone said.

After two weeks, students go back to the school and present their interim design ideas. The students get feedback from the principals, teachers and facility group. Students are also encouraged to come up with multiple alternative designs and use feedback to narrow it down to one.

“That one is refined and developed architecturally by architecture students and as a landscape by our students,” Boone said. “We hold a final presentation in week five or six and invite everyone who participated in the process to offer their criticism and feedback of the work. After that review, the landscape architecture students take the remainder of the semester to produce grading and drainage documents and refining the design.”

Working with the WCPSS has provided the studio with many opportunities for student growth, learning and real project exposure. Every year the WCPSS has been supportive of these projects and wants to be involved, according to Hu.

“To me, it’s almost like they are doing us a favor to help us run our project more successfully by investing in their own time, the time that they take off of work,” Hu said.

The collaborative studio will work better project planning moving forward and may be publicized more in the future so that the general public is more aware of what the studio is doing, according to Hu. This year, the students went back to Wiley Elementary after the five week project period and did a display of the projects. 

“They actually got all the second graders or third grader students in groups,” Hu said. “They huddled around the projects with our students and our students talked about what we do as architects and the little kids are very excited. This is a great way of recruiting for our next generation of designers. Other than the professional design work, we could focus on more these kinds of things so that it has a bigger impact on our communities.”