Student Winners of The 2000 DuPont Benedictus

The Aker Partners Inc.

Serving as technical advisor to the jury and program author for the student projects:

T. Scott Rawlings, Stein-Cox Group, Phoenix, AZ

This year's jury chose to designate a first and second prize and three entries as equally deserving of the competition's combined third prize and honorable mentions, because they shared equally in achieving excellence in design and their approach to the entire project. Comments from the judges on their sense of this common achievement are as follows:

JUDGES' OVERALL COMMENTS:

"The jury has been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the projects, by the multiplicity of aspects in the programming, the research undertaken by the students into such areas as the effects of light and color on the patient's recovery progress. It's a very, very complex program to understand and incorporate into a competition like this. We were quite impressed by the standard of the work that was presented.
"At the same time, one of the worries that we have what the computer seems to extract from the manipulator of it, without his really knowing it. And that the computer runs away and does some very magical things that very often don't have any reality. And also in terms of presentation, you know, it's very voguish to overlap plans, elevations, bits of landscape, bits of this and sections of that, and it makes it awfully hard for those of us who are judging to be able to read a plan and sections that we're meant to see. I suspect that the students themselves are not separating these things out, or at least looking at them as distinctly as they could, because they're all blurred. The risk is that it goes too far, and we see things which are extremely imaginative, but it's the result of the ease of using a computer to create a space, or the illusion of a space, without any real bones behind it, the real substance behind the design."

"..... This is a very human building type, this is healthcare, and I think students could benefit from doing a lot more work with just pen and pencil and paper, sketching and re-grounding themselves, just with a little more art and less technical interference. De-institutionalize the plan. The computer allows you to go too quickly, too fast for a building type, without really experimenting with the alternatives."

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