Highlighting Student Final Portfolios

Something rare happened this semester with the students in Architecture 34 at Fresno City College . There was above average effort from EACH AND EVERY STUDENT! This has never happened, at least not in the four years I have been teaching this course as an adjunct teaching part-time. Our classes in the Architecture division are not large - our architecture community in Fresno overall is quite small compared with other major American Cities. Nonetheless we take our craft seriously and strive to design, build and teach to the highest levels of practice taking place across the US. 11 students total enrolled in the course this semester and EACH earned either an 'A' or a 'B' and developed a very good portfolio to feature their project.

Rare why? Well, usually there is a student or two that struggles to attend regularly or gives up midway through the semester. College is not easy to begin with, the past couple years have added more challenges, and many California Community Colleges junior college students try and balance classes with work to bridge financial needs. So it's no surprise when a couple students fall behind or stop attending altogether. Something happened though this semester with these 11 students. Their effort and focus was outstanding - each of them worked very hard, developed their modeling and renderings skills very quickly and applied themselves seriously toward developing their projects.

Here is a short clip explaining the exceptional work experienced this semester and a bit about their final project.

For their final project, students were given a independent cafe project in downtown Vienna. The program was an approximate 1,800sf space with defined spaces in three categories: cafe, barista/prep area and support spaces. Each student also had a 300sf bonus space they could add to their cafe space. The core software we learn is Sketchup for modeling and Lumion for rendering but we're in an out of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Revit. I emphasize the design thinking, the problem solving, the iterating and detailing their design work - not the software. Students are not required to represent their design work in any particular way. In fact, I give them the freedom to model in other software if they are proficient for a specific graphic or diagram. We have lectures on building materials, detailing, design for accessibility and we use open critique and desk crits to ensure projects are always advancing in a meaningful way. At the end, we do all our rendering work in Lumion.

I was very impressed with the work they put in this semester and the portfolios they submitted last week for their final. Each student put in the extra effort on their project, week in and week out. Our class meets for five hours once a week on Wednesday evenings. Class is over at 10:30p and it was not uncommon for students to ask me to keep studio open well past the end of class time.

Perhaps it was due to being back in person after two years of online instruction. Maybe scaling back from three projects throughout the semester down to two helped improve the quality of their work. Whatever the reason, below are their names and a short animation through their work - they deserve to be acknowledged for their work and their potential as future architects!

Lizzette Aguilar, Mohamad Alattar, Hanadi Alzin, Ebonie Castano, Jeffrey Cousineau, Valentin Gomez, Joshua Gonzalez, Javier Juarez-Baltazar, Makenna Koop, Matthew Macias, Javier Perez Rios.

Great work and outstanding effort. It makes the effort so much more worthwhile when the work excels as each of you have done this semester. Continued success to each of you!