This was a pretty exciting weekend for Studio V. We have been working all semester in preparation for the ZanFagna inspired symposium Bio-Logical Architecture: Past, Present, and Future. Since we couldn’t bring the dome to the symposium, the special guests of the symposium came to the dome. Saturday morning William Katavolos and Linda Weintraub, the two invited panelists of the symposium came to visit us at the Shop, but the surprise visit of Don ZanFagna himself made for the most special moment of our semester so far. Don, who was all smiles, enjoyed meeting the students and hearing about all their stories concerning the trials and tribulations of the project. He often referred to the students to me as my “workers”, and that made me smile. I could see his appreciation of their hard work and I know the students noticed it as well, which made it all so worthwhile. Katavolos and Weintraub were also very interested in the studio’s work, and both made many compliments. My favorite compliment by Katavolos was that “Bucky” (Buckminster Fuller) could never have built the dome that we did. His point was referring to the fact that we had bisected the dome and merged it with a trestle/suspension bridge. He said it was like we were giving the finger to Bucky who was such a purist when it came to his dome designs that he would never have done something like we had. I think that’s quite the compliment.
The afternoon brought the long anticipated symposium. We were honored to be asked to present our work during the event, and Andrew, Daniel and Jace represented the studio well. We converted our 8’x8′ documentation piece into a slick Prezi presentation which you can see here, which worked very well. Daniel also got the opportunity to share the stage with Katavolos which was fitting as Daniel was the most interested student during the semester in unraveling Katavolos’s concepts of water architecture.
It was a wonderful end to a very successful semester.
