Desk

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Virginia San Fratello and Rob Silance, professors in Clemson University's architecture department, and Jennifer Carpenter of TRUCK Product Architecture recently collaborated to bring an innovative new class to Clemson's undergraduate architecture school. Working in teams, seven students designed desks for architecture students. Not so unusual - except that several winning schemes may be realized at full scale for the school's graduate students. A hybrid of furniture and environment, it addresses the overlapping programs of the academic design studio: drawing, building, eating, cooking and playing. The students propose a 28-foot long, lightweight concrete communal desk that facilitates group projects and encourages communication, networking and physical interaction. The desk contains a sink that can be used for preparing dinner or soaking wood for models. A heating element can be used for cooking or bending modeling materials. The concrete desk has been engineered by the Civil Engineering Department at Clemson and will be made of a lightweight concrete admixture that includes glass bubbles and polypropylene fibers for reinforcement that the civil engineering students use each year to make a concrete canoe. The formwork for the desk will be designed and fabricated by architecture students in fall 2004; in a one-day exercise the civil engineering students and architecture students will work together to pour the concrete for the desk. The project has been featured in Blueprint Magazine and in an upcoming issue of Metropolis Magazine.

For more information about the Clemson + TRUCK collaboration please contact:

Virginia San Fratello, vfratel@clemson.edu
Jennifer Carpenter, jcarpenter@the-truck.com
Rob Silance, silancr@clemson.edu