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Mark Brown

School: Health and Science School

Year: Junior

When I came to ACE, I was put in as part of Group 4, a group made of mostly second-year ACE students and art students. I was neither. Our group, along with two of the other three groups, chose to make a performing arts addition to a run-down old high school.

Our task was to pretend that the school was still functional and to make it a whole new part for the performing arts 鈥� and all for under $2.4 million. This was a quick joy for many of the members of my group because many of them had a history in the arts.

The art students and the seniors who had done ACE last year got to talking about their plans as if they already knew everything that would happen. I found myself lost in their quick ideas.

Our first meeting continued when all the groups went to observe the site. There were three things on the almost vacant lot: a large field, the main school building and something a little odd. The old brick school stood in front of us, four stories tall, but the tallest and most noticeable object on the block was an old building with a large smokestack. We had no clue what it was or why it was there, but it sure did catch everyone鈥檚 attention.

Two weeks later we had the first official team meeting of Group 4. We met on the 26th floor of the US Bancorp Tower 鈥� or, as we called it, 鈥淏ig Pink.鈥� It was quite an exciting place with an amazing view of the east side and the river.

It was an interesting meeting due to the fact that we had only met in a larger setting before and never really worked together as a group. From the start it was easy to see that we all had a passion for design.

Our first task was to figure out how we wanted all the rooms to fit together. We thought this was a fairly straightforward task, but soon found out otherwise. As we all presented our different ways of doing a seemingly simple task, we found that there are many very different ways of approaching it. Many of us felt strongly about our ideas when we presented them the first time.

We were sent back to revise our ideas when we were faced with a common dilemma. This was the fact that I noticed far before anyone else. While all our ideas worked, they were all squares. No one had thought of anything much different than the simple and efficient box.

I went to look out the window at the beautiful cityscape. I saw all the square buildings on their square city blocks with their square rooms, and realized that very few of them stood out. That is when I came up with a new idea of how to present this building, something that would make it stand out and be iconic.

I shared my idea with the members around me and we quickly went off on this new idea of 鈥渙ld meets new.鈥� We thought that instead of burying the curve of the auditorium, we should make it stick out. The bottom would be rounded instead of square, and would stick out just above the entrance so everyone would know the focus of this addition.

We are still working on this idea and advancing it, but it is quite a shift from our starting point.