October 17, 2022
APDesign professors win awards at Design Communication Association Conference
Professors from the College of Architecture, Planning & Design received awards for their drawings submitted to the Design Communication Association 2022 International Juried Drawing Exhibition. Associate Professor Nathan Howe, department head of interior architecture & industrial design, and Assistant Professor Adulsak "Otto" Chanyakorn of the architecture department were both recognized.
Chanyakorn earned two awards in the exhibition. His first piece was titled "Piazza del Campo, Sienna." The work portrays a harmonious balance between the campo and the surrounding areas. This drawing won the William Kirby Lockard Prize, which is the Best of Show award at the association's International Juried Drawing Exhibition.
Chanyakorn describes the inspiration for his prize-winning piece: "Walking through the narrow streets of this ancient city with dim light coming from above, one feels a sense of intimacy and compression. When one reaches the Campo, the feeling of openness is amplified by the stark contrast of spatial quality, a perfect juxtaposition between the density of narrow streets and the openness of the ancient piazza. A gentle slope directs one's gaze toward the focal point punctuated by the beautiful tower reaching the open sky. With an intricate and subtle design, the Pizza del Campo is one of the best piazzas in the world."
Chanyakorn's second submitted piece, titled "La Rotunda," won the Observation Drawing Faculty Category Award. The watercolor painting reveals the geometries of Villa Rotonda in Vicenza, Italy, by Andrea Palladio, utilizing cutaway isometrics to depict the beautiful geometrical arrangement in design that otherwise could not be seen through a perspectival view.
Howe submitted a piece titled "The Rookery," which depicts Frank Lloyd Wright's interior renovation of the Rookery atrium in Chicago. The drawing hybrid reveals a 360 vertical panorama of the space from the main level stair to the Wright's second-level centerpiece stair to the atrium's entry. The process of making this drawing was established through Howe's development of an app, PixArt, that converts images to a drawing where traditional techniques of hand-crafted hatching are rendered through his algorithm. This drawing represents one of the final stages of this app's development of this technique. He received the Liz Swanson Juror's Choice Award in the Observational Drawing Category.
The exhibition was in tandem with the biennial Design Communication Association Conference, hosted at Auburn University on Oct. 5-8. Various types of designers submitted visual works relating to the theme of design communication, including industry professionals and professors, as well as graduate and undergraduate students.
The exhibition booklet is yet to be published, but can be found soon on the Design Communication Association's exhibitions website.