If you build it – in Bird Library – they will come

UPDATED: March 18, 2017 at 2:42 p.m.

Graduate students in architecture and engineering teamed up this semester to produce an exhibit in Bird Library opening April 14 on sustainability.

“It will be an interactive space in Bird Library,” Laura Clark, an architecture grad student and member of the project’s campus outreach team.

The exhibit will be a physical installation that incorporates virtual and augmented reality as part of the show. While the details have not been finalized — they will be on Monday, March 20 — the team, dubbed Sustainacuse, thinks it could be a room or a tunnel that students can walk through and around.

Conceived by architecture professor Amber Bartosh and engineering professor Mark Povinelli, building the exhibit is part of a collaborative graduate-level class between the two programs. Besides the fact that they received a grant to do sustainability research, the two professors are committed to sustainability.

“They both recognize that this is at the forefront of architects’ and engineers’ minds,” Clark said. “When we are designing for the future, we need to be thinking about sustainability.”

At the beginning of the semester, Bartosh and Povinelli divided the class into 11 groups and each came up with a design plan for the exhibit. Everyone came together to discuss each design plan, and eventually voted for the four best models. The final design will be a combination of those four plans. Over spring break, everyone will finalize their ideas. In class Monday, the group will solidify the plan.

Those original groups have not completely disappeared, though. Each group is responsible for a different part of the exhibit’s production. Clark is on the social media team. She also listed teams for augmented reality, fabrication and software. Small group collaboration leads to the final product.

Bartosh, the architecture professor, has worked on similar projects before, but never one to this scale.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, Mark Povinelli was misidentified. The Daily Orange regrets this error.