Students enhancing local built environment through STAR Center projects

Alfred State students in the Architecture and Design department are helping to improve the quality of the built environment in Allegany County and the surrounding region through a number of Southern Tier Architectural Resource (STAR) Center civic engagement projects.

The STAR Center is a collaboration of two organizations in the department: the Architecture Club and the Interior Design Club, which, through the promotion of sound design and planning principles, seek to enhance the local built environment.

Last semester, architectural technology majors Jeremy Dearing, of Allentown, PA, and Andrew Scott, of Arverne, NY, proposed designs for a project at Pioneer Park in Dansville. The project involved creating a place for a monument marking the park as Dansville’s first cemetery - where many are still interred - as well as landscaping and lighting work.

“What the clients were proposing was fairly low impact and it was really meant to just formalize the park and create a place for a new monument that they had already made,” said Bill Dean, chair of the department of Architecture and Design. “Most of the time you would create the plan first and then place the monument. They had the monument first and it was like, ‘All right, where do we put it?’

“Jeremy and Andrew worked on that and talked about two different possible locations for the monument and did renderings of what that might look like, just to kind of give them some guidance.”

Dearing said, “I’m very glad that I was able to get some real hands-on experience with actual clients.”

In the fall of 2013, Dean said, two students through the STAR Center also presented designs for a project that involved placing a welcome sign in downtown Bath. The clients ultimately chose architectural technology major and Syracuse, NY, native Katie Dussing’s plan.

“We’ve done a lot of these conceptualizations but we’re starting to see more activity with actually implementing them,” Dean said, “which is nice because it’s great to have the ideas on paper but you want to see them built at some point.”

Since 2013, according to Dean, the STAR Center students have undertaken eight typically infrastructure-related civic engagement projects, mainly in the Southern Tier. Potential upcoming projects include conceptual planning for a pocket park in Scio, documenting existing conditions for a veterans’ center in Rushford and for a building in downtown Buffalo, and a master plan for Lions Camp Badger in Spencer, NY.

Another project involves two students working with the Alfred State Sustainability Committee on converting an L-shaped area near the Central Dining Hall into a community garden.

“It’s not a huge space, it’s not a big project, but any place we can help, we’re happy to give the students that type of experience,” Dean said. “We don’t know if the garden is going to be edibles or perennials. That hasn’t been decided yet.”

Libby Dussault, an architecture and interior design student, from Horseheads, NY, said the STAR Center provides an awesome opportunity for students.

“It’s a good way to meet and work with other people and form relationships and learn how to work on a project with someone else because we do a couple of partner projects in the studio but nothing that has follow-through and you don’t see the end result and I think working with clients, that’s a good opportunity, too,” she said.

Dean noted, “These students are actually getting that experience of talking to people about their problems and helping them develop solutions to the extent that they can do that through an academic exercise, so I think it really provides a tremendous experience for the students that they’re not going to get in every architecture program.”

Pictured in photo above are, from top, counter-clockwise, Alfred State architectural technology majors Jeremy Dearing and Andrew Scott, and members of the Pioneer Park Committee Patricia Kreiley, Paul Hoffman, and Jane Schryver. The students worked with the committee members on a civic engagement project at Pioneer Park in Dansville last semester through the college’s Southern Tier Architectural Resource (STAR) Center.