Fishing for a design

SANDY — The University of Utah architecture students got the assignment in late August.

"Pretend there is suddenly some money to build a new home for the Living Planet Aquarium. Pretend that, instead of 90,000 square feet, the client wants only a 20,000-square-foot building. (After all, a 20,000-square-foot project will be challenging enough for you students to complete in one semester.)

"Now go out and learn everything you can about the site and about aquariums, and while you are at it come up with an abstract theme or metaphor for your design. Create an 'object' to represent your theme. And don't forget to use 'green' or 'sustainable' design."

The assignment was all-consuming, the architecture students said. They estimated they each spent at least 40 hours a week working on it.

The 14 students talked about their projects one afternoon in early December as they stood next to the blueprints and models they'd created. It was the grand opening of the "Student-Designed Projects" exhibit in the current home of the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy.

The current home of the Living Planet Aquarium is, in fact, a former grocery store.

No one knows if the aquarium proponents will ever get funding to hire a real architect and actually get a new building, and if they do, whether the new aquarium would be built in Sandy or at the site that was first considered, in downtown Salt Lake City. It might be built someplace else entirely.

The point of this exercise is not to give the clients a design they will end up using but to help them see all the possibilities, explains Anne Mooney. Mooney, an assistant professor in the U.'s college of architecture and planning, explains that these graduate-school exercises also help the students see the range of diversity that is possible.

In the past her students have worked on a spiritual retreat center and on a workshop for independent filmmakers. After they study the site and before they start designing a building, Mooney requires her students to create an "object."

She says, "I do that because it helps them to study an idea and then start to translate it into form." She doesn't want them to go straight from research to drawing blueprints. When that happens, she says, you get too many designs that look too much alike.

"This helps them keep in the concept realm. It helps them free up, be more expressive."