December 20, 2018 Chattanooga Community Receives Design Ideas from Architecture Students

Students in the School of Architecture spent this semester working and collaborating with the Chattanooga Design Studio to generate innovative, practical design solutions to solve some of the city’s issues with structure and community connectivity.

The fifth-year studio, led by Architecture lecturer Kevin Stevens, concluded with final reviews at the college during the last week of November and in Chattanooga on Dec. 3-4 with members of the community.

“Many local architects, design professionals and citizens attended the showcase of our whole studio in Chattanooga,” said students Nathaniel Nalley and Evan Scaria. “There was a lot of positive feedback and interest regarding our ideas.”

During the review in Chattanooga, the Chattanooga Design Studio hosted a community reception to help engage the community and make the studio’s work available for public viewing.

“The feedback we received from the community was fascinating and extremely helpful to establish the practicality of our proposal,” student Katie Hitchcock said.

Added her studio partner Kristia Bravo, “The best part of working on this project was the ability to interface with professionals in Chattanooga and the residents of our chosen sites.”

The UT studio greatly benefited from partnering with the local design firm on these projects. Not only did students immerse themselves into Chattanooga’s local culture, but they also relied on the Chattanooga Design Studio’s expertise about the area and its constituents.

“We were able to engage with a large number of constituencies that we might not have been able to access otherwise,” Stevens said. “We were able to draw on the Chattanooga Design Studio’s deep understanding of place in pursuing the work of the studio.”

Partnerships like these help our students succeed by allowing them to gain practical knowledge, and our state and region benefit from these partnerships because of our students’ creativity and innovative designs.

“The partnership with the Chattanooga Design Studio has been a great experience,” Stevens said. “We and the Chattanooga Design Studio look forward to continuing this dialogue in the future.”

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Read more about the Chattanooga studio

See student work from this studio