One design concept for an art student’s college apartment includes ‘galleries’ for entertaining and socializing, and ‘studio’ spaces for creating and studying. Another design for a student suite suggests music and surfing themes for Marine Biology majors. Yet another uses an urban palette in an apartment, to capture the essence of walking down a city street in New York or Paris.
The concepts for transforming typically sterile dorms will be open for touring by the public from 9am to 2.15pm, on August 27 and 28, at the recently completed housing project, North Torrey Pines Road. Design Institute students will be on hand to discuss their work.
Mark Cunningham, executive director of Housing, Dining and Hospitality, said, “We had six teams of interior design students develop their ideas and concepts about what they envision a fully furnished student apartment could be, and then we awarded the teams the opportunity to actually implement each of their designs in a new unit.”
The design concepts include, Urban Nature, incorporating images of nature as well as smells, textures and sounds of nature; Urban Palette, incorporating custom murals of city streets; Eco System, a complex idea which envisions the lower floor as ‘under the sea’ and the upper floor as the shore; and a ‘reef’ study lab.
The design institute teams were led by Lily Robinson, architect/interior designer and Design Institute faculty; the student teams spent the summer semester developing their ideas for the UC San Diego housing project. “The students went through the challenges of working with a real client and bringing a design concept to life within a limited budget – challenges that all interior designers face in professional practice,” she noted.
Through the Looking Glass is based on the narrative of ‘Alice in Wonderland’; ‘ReUse, Recycle, RePurpose’, explores an ideal living environment for art students, and ‘Modern Modular’, focuses on male students who are interested in music and surfing, and uses color coding for student belongings.
‘The Village’ housing project contains 1,060 beds for transfer students, and is part of a 3,000-bed building effort currently underway at the campus. Construction for the $122 million project began in January 2008, and will be completed for student arrivals in mid-September.
