“(Renaming the store is) the best way to ensure that Lou’s immeasurable contribution to the work of everyone in the architecture community is remembered by future students who sadly cannot have the privilege of knowing her,” Fromm and Ponnudurai wrote.
Maya Simms, a third-year student in the School of Architecture, said Kearns would always ask about projects architecture students were working on and provide any advice she could.
“Lou was the best kind of person to run the supply store,” Simms wrote in an email to The D.O. “I’m abroad this year, and it still hasn’t set in that someone else will be running the store when I get back to campus.”
Simms recalled that at the very beginning of her freshman year at SU, she found herself overwhelmed by the options in the store. She was building her first-ever model and was faced with the choice of dozens of glues. Kearns talked her through which glues were the best to buy, Simms said.
Other students such as Luis Martin Lopez, a fifth-year architecture student, shared similar stories.
Kearns’ experience in the shop was helpful for younger students, Lopez said. Different professors in the school have different styles, and through Kearns’ work and conversations in the supply shop, she was able to point people in the right direction based on which professor they had. She was also extremely familiar with the materials in the store, as she was an artist herself who specialized in ceramics and metalworking, Lopez said.
“Lou, to the architecture school, is kind of like a grandmother,” he said.
