The Cut, Beach and Beyond

School of Architecture puts interdisciplinary students to work - Professor Steve Lee oversees a crew of nine students laying down sections of a polypropylene hexagonal grid and filling them with pea gravel. Restricted to passersby by a chain-link fence, this small construction site adjacent to Margaret Morrison Street is the result of a yearlong project for an interdisciplinary set of students who conceived and crafted an outdoor seating area at Carnegie Mellon University. The project, "The Cut, Beach and Beyond," is the culmination of Lee's and Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Teaching Professor Sarah Christian's efforts to revive and enhance a semester-long design/build course run by former CMU Professor Larry Cartwright. After 12 years as head of the School of Architecture (SoA), and taking a sabbatical the following year, Lee is using the three years of a phased retirement to build a sustainable design/build program. In Lee's model, students from the School of Architecture in the College of Fine Arts and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering spend a semester designing a campus project and another building it. As Lee supervises the build site, an additional crew works under the guidance of Jon Holmes , SoA SHOP director, to prefabricate the seating components. Kimberlyn Cho works on a piece of hexagonal grid under the guidance of Steve Lee at the "Cut, Beach and Beyond" project site in late April.