Students sprout plans for senior class gift

The Senior Class Gift Committee took time away from raising money for the Peace Garden, its gift to the University, to critique some of the 40 proposals designed by students in the Landscape Architecture 327 (Design II) class yesterday.

"I was amazed. I was just blown away by the designs," said Amy Andryszak, public relations chair for the Senior Class Gift Committee. "I never realized the amount of work that goes into landscape architecture."

The landscape architecture class is taught jointly by Dan Jones, professor of landscape architecture, and Dan Nadenicek and Ken Tamminga, assistant professors of landscape architecture. Every year one of the projects for the class is to design a garden -- this year the professors and students are glad to work with a real site. The Peace Garden will be located between the McAllister and Henderson Buildings.

"It's exciting -- it is nice to have a space that is so close to us that we can go look at," said Loren Foster (sophomore-landscape architecture). Foster is one of the students in the class who produced a proposal.

The gift committee wants as much student input as possible on the gift, Andryszak said. In addition to looking to landscape architecture for designs, the committee also wants to have a landscape contracting class to physically construct the garden.

"Our idea was very much to bring students into it," Andryszak said. "We love the idea that this would be the first senior class gift that would be produced and constructed almost entirely by students."

There will be a meeting after spring break comprised of members of the committee, representatives from landscape architecture and landscape contracting and members of the Office of Physical Plant. This committee will review the proposals and discuss ideas for the final design.

No one knows how the design will be chosen, or how elements of the students' work could be combined, Jones said. He also said the students' designs vary quite a bit. Some have incorporated structures into their work, while many students emphasized plants.

"At some point a professional landscape architect should be hired to refine the final solution," he said.

In addition to the complexities of choosing the elements of the Peace Garden, Andryszak and Jones said they would like to bring in students from other art mediums to contribute to the final design.

"We're beginning to realize that the design process is so huge that it is too optimistic to design the entire project without collaboration," said Zachary Davis (sophomore-landscape architecture). "Especially to design it exquisitely."

The full design and model is the last step in the project. In order to complete it, the landscape architecture students had to complete extensive analysis and research of the site. They also had to write a 300-word statement about their concept of peace. The class then did concept diagrams to work toward producing a complete design and building scale models.

So far, the gift committee has raised about $93,000. Andryszak said she expects the total to reach $100,000 by tomorrow. The design will be chosen by the end of the semester, but construction will not begin until 1999 because of the HUB expansion project.