Mr. Dotta's Technology Education Blog at Ridge High : RHS Architecture Program Teams up with UVA

Ridge Architecture students in Mr. Mark Dotta’s class, teamed up with the University of Virginia and Professor Sanda Lliescu to create custom abstract structures. Mr. Dotta’s inspiration for this project came from his dedication to preparing his students for both college and real world experiences. It’s not uncommon for him to reach out to his engineering or architecture alumni students for advice. “I want to say on top of the latest trends and I love to see what projects my alumni are doing in college”, said Mark. He then takes that information and applies it to his classroom so he can prepare his students as best he can. This project was a perfect example of this as he wanted to give his students an experience that he saw so many of his alumni doing at college. “My architecture curriculum lacked this extremely abstract approach to a hands-on project that is so often part of what architecture majors are doing at college,” Mark said.

With that he teamed up with UVA and had his students study the work of Professor Lliescu’s students. The theories and lessons intertwined abstract art and hands-on methods, which was just what he was looking for. First students drew their structures in 3D on AutoCAD and then they built them from scratch. The following projects are a result of hours of designing and building the structures from an array of materials such as wood, foam board, cardboard and acrylic. Some students even 3D printed and laser cut members of their structures.

You can use your imagination to see how a project went from step one to step three or just sign up for Mr. Dotta’s class!

Step One – Randomly draw boxes and color