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For the second year in a row, students from the College of Architecture and Design have placed in an international steel design competition. Janusz Ziobrowski, Karolina Rachwal and Yiwen Wu, students in Adjunct Asst. Professor ’s third-year Architecture studio, earned an honorable mention in the 16^th Annual from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Steel Construction.

The competition challenges students across the nation and world to explore a variety of design issues related to the use of steel in design and construction. Ziobrowski, Rachwel and Wu, exchange students from Krakow Polytechnic in Poland, and China Southeast University, created a design, Voided Tower, for the “Tall Buildings” category to find alternative design approaches to tall buildings and create high-rise buildings that are inspired by the cultural, physical and environmental aspects of the place surrounding them.

The students were required to design using future technologies to allow advancement in steel structure, form, skin, function, operations, systems and expression and take into account the impact of the building locally, city wide and globally.

The UT students’ design of a high-rise building in Chicago suggests the transformation of the city block into a vertical community, in essence re-humanizing the quality of social life in a city. This “vertical city block” has a transparent skin to generate a new experience of living in a city center.

About 125 designs were judged in the competition.

“Having our third-year students participating and placing in international competitions of this caliber says a lot about the commitment to excellence by the college, its students and the faculty,” said Stevens. “The importance and quality of our international exchange opportunities are very evident; it was a great mix of students in our studio sharing ideas and challenging one another,” he said.

In 2015, Kristin Bowman and Emanuel Huber-Feely, a cross-disciplinary team from the college’s schools of Interior Design and Architecture, respectively, also placed at the honorable mention level.

To visit the UT students’ designs and see other winning designs, see below and click .

Photo:  Winners in the ACSA Steel Student Design Competition from Kevin Stevens’s studio are (second row, center) Karolina Rachwal, (second row, far right) Janusz Ziobrowski and (front row, second from right) Yiwen Wu.

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