University Of Colorado, Denver: Back To School Student Spotlight Featuring Jacob Taswell (MArch '23)

Press release from the University of Colorado, Denver :

Erica Langendorff

November 12, 2021

Hometown: Bethesda, MD

Undergraduate School and Major: Yale University, Music

Program: M Arch, 6-Studio Track

I stayed in Colorado for the most part. I worked as a research assistant at LoDo Lab, which is an interdisciplinary lab affiliated with CAP that conducts research on the role of growth and decay in architecture, landscape architecture, art, and design. My job was to make speculative drawings about decay for LoDo Lab’s Nurse Pods project. The work was exploratory and fun. I also took two classes: Furniture Design and Building Information Modeling (BIM).

My partner and I got a plot in the community garden. It was my first time gardening since I was a kid. We planted tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, zucchinis, peas, green beans, kale, lettuce, beets, radishes, basil, and nasturtium. In July and August we hardly bought any produce from the store!

I had the opportunity to apply the graphic skills I learned during my first year of school to the drawings I made for LoDo Lab. It was fun to experiment with ways of representing decay and growth that are both systematic and atmospheric. A lot of the techniques and issues of representation that I studied in classes with Matt Shea, Anca Matyiku, and Kevin Hirth came into play here.

I spent a week with my parents at the beach, which was amazing! I love the mountains, but I do miss the ocean here in Colorado. I also got to see some of my college friends in Salt Lake City who I haven’t seen since the pandemic started. We went mountain biking and made homemade Earl Grey ice cream.

I’m looking forward to tackling a more complex design brief in Studio III and developing a more believable building. I love that architectural thinking has so much value beyond strictly designing buildings, and I really enjoyed doing projects about abstract spatial relationships and storytelling in the first two studios, but buildings are also cool.

This press release was produced by the University of Colorado, Denver. The views expressed here are the author’s own.