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Learning the Language
of Design
When Lindsey Allen ’08 applied to colleges
two years ago, she was looking for a relatively small liberal arts school that had
an engineering program and was less than six hours away from her home in Macedon,
New York. “There weren’t that many on the East Coast,” says Allen,
19. Smith subsequently rose to the top of her list. “I narrowed it down to
Smith, and they did an amazing job with financial aid, which is why I can go here.”
 Allen
stuck with engineering for an entire year until she took Issues in Landscape Studies. “I
thought it was the coolest thing I ever heard of,” Allen says of the two-credit
class. “I never really thought about architecture. I think I was just completely
set on becoming a civil engineer or a city planner or urban designer, and I didn’t
even think about taking another route.” Now that Allen is a second-semester
sophomore, her schedule is no longer full of chemistry and math, but now has an assortment
of art and design courses. She has changed her major to architecture with a minor
in landscape studies.
On Wednesdays, Allen pulls herself out of
bed and logs onto her Smith e-mail and Facebook accounts. Without any boldfaced subject
headings flagging unread messages or electronic nudges, “pokes,” to idle
her time, she showers, brushes her teeth, and dresses in jeans, a button-down collared
shirt, v-neck sweater and black wool coat. Allen, who lives in Jordan House, usually
walks to the neighboring King Scales dining room to eat meals with her fellow housemates.
She allows herself plenty of time to enjoy a toasted blueberry bagel with cream cheese
and to make dinner plans with two of her advisees (Allen is a student academic adviser
to the first-year class in Jordan). Then Allen and her friends begin their eight-minute
trek from the Quad to the Brown Fine Arts building for her 9 a.m. architecture studio.
Although Allen arrives about 10 minutes early,
many of her classmates are already working on their drawings and corresponding basswood
models. This is Allen’s first studio architecture course, but she moves with
comfort in the spacious studio, where each student has her own station—a drawing
board and several drawers in which to keep supplies. Allen says she enjoys the class
because she learns the language, materials and habits of designers and takes class
trips to notable museums. On a February weekend, Allen and her classmates traveled
to New Haven, Connecticut, and studied and sketched the Yale Center of British Art,
a 32-year-old building designed by the internationally acclaimed Louis I. Kahn, an
architect she admires. When Allen returned to Smith, she worked at her desk for a
few hours, only to return to the station Monday morning. “I had been with architecture
students for 12 hours,” says Allen, who hopes to spend the next school year
studying architecture in Denmark. “We had left here at 10 and I didn’t
leave the studio again till 10 at night. I can’t get away from this place.”
 She
usually eats lunch in the King Scales dining room, runs errands and sometimes squeezes
in a 20-minute power nap before catching a bus to her 20th-Century Architecture class
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Allen used to keep the scoreboard and
work out statistics for volleyball and basketball games; now that the winter sports
season is over, she devotes more time to her coursework in Islamic Art and Architecture
as well as Public Opinion and Mass Media. She also gives tours as a Gold Key guide
and reshelves books at the William A. Neilson library.
The highlight of Allen’s week is on Wednesday
nights when she attends The Playground Project—a one-credit landscape studies
class in which engineering, architecture, landscape studies and education students
work together to design a local playground. “I like that class because it’s
very hands on and applicable to the real world right now,” Allen says. “Whereas,
in my other classes I study what other people have done and I’m doing small
projects that won’t necessarily be built, with this class I have a direct link
to design things that will be built. I feel like I’m in the midst of the real
world.”
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