Structural Sojourn
By: Monica Elliott, IE 94 | Categories: Alumni Interest
Many college students spend the summer after freshman year on vacation, taking a break from their challenging studies. But five College of Design freshmen plunged head first into a challenge when they decided to combine their summer break with a prestigious international design competition at Tongji University in China.
Sydney Anderson, Emma Chasteen, Yebin (Alice) Choi, Heewon (Eden) Jeong and Anna McCuan represented Georgia Tech in the 2017 “Fengyuzhu” Plastic Polypropylene Design and Construction Competition, part of the annual Tongji International Construction Festival, which was held last June in Shanghai.
The competition provided a rare opportunity for the first-year architecture students to build a full-scale structure.
It was also a special opportunity for Chasteen, who returned to China for the first time since she was adopted by a Griffin, Ga., family at six months old. Chasteen says she was excited not only to participate in the design competition, but about experiencing the culture where she was born.
“We all were first-year architecture students and had not yet taken Construction Tech or Structures [classes], so we learned a lot about how to make something that actually stands up,” Chasteen says. “It gave me a new perspective between designing something on paper and actually building it. It was a bonus that it happened to be an amazing international competition [taking place] where I was adopted.”
Michelle Rinehart, the College of Design’s associate dean for academic affairs and outreach, led the trip to China as the team’s faculty adviser. She says Georgia Tech was one of just two architecture programs in the United States invited to participate, along with a team from the University of Hawaii.
“The competition involves all of the freshmen in architecture at Tongji [University], but they also invite other architecture programs in China to participate. Then they invite 11 international teams,” Rinehart says.
Each team was given four days to design and build a pavilion made out of polypropylene, a type of plastic also known as PPL.
The team spent the first two days vetting and streamlining design ideas, which required factoring in the rain showers in the weather forecast.
“Our structure was based off the idea that we thought we were going to be building in the rain,” Chasteen explains. “We ended up being moved inside to build, but we kept with our original idea of creating a system of panels that would shed the water down and away from the inhabitants. From the exterior perspective, it was to look like an artificial waterfall of sorts, with water flowing down identical consecutive panels that were strategically angled to create an arc for the water to flow down.”
Although they didn’t place in the competition, the participants gained the invaluable experience of building a structure as well as getting to know each other and meeting people from around the world.
“They had done design work and built small models, but they’d never built anything full-scale,” Rinehart says. “And it happened to be an all-female team. I think we were the only all-female team out of the 11 international teams to participate.”
After the competition, Choi and Jeong traveled to their homes in South Korea, while Chasteen, McCuan, Anderson and Rinehart remained in China for another week of sightseeing in places like Beijing and the Great Wall of China.
“The opportunity for a faculty member to travel with a small group of students and do this type of project is really rewarding,” Rinehart says. “You learn a lot more about them. You get to engage in deeper conversations with them, get to know them personally, and learn more about what they are passionate about.”
