Elizabeth Cronin is a graduate student in the School of Architecture’s pedagogy program. She left Harvard to return to the University of Florida for her master’s in architecture and is now working on an advanced degree in teaching.
What have you valued most about your time at the College of Design, Construction and Planning?
In my time at the College of Design, Construction and Planning, I have most valued the architecture faculty. They have put an amazing amount of time and effort into constructing a graduate program that is exciting and current with a curriculum able to place itself between academia and practice. They have ambitiously crafted projects that push the edges of our educational boundaries and provided opportunities to teach, travel, learn through making, build at a 1:1 scale, work with materials and design for the community.
What class have you enjoyed the most so far at DCP?
Last fall I participated in a Design/Build studio. We built two projects at Cedar Key — a stair on Seahorse Key for the UF Department of Biology and two spaces for sitting at Cemetery Point. Although all of my graduate studio courses have been phenomenal, designing and building on site was an incredible experience and stands out as unique in the way we solved problems, worked as a team and designed for a client. In this course, we also had the opportunity to complete a woodworking workshop with visiting professors from Norway and Finland. I really enjoyed learning about the ways they work with materials and how this shapes their perspectives on design.
What will you take away from your time here?
From my time at the College of Design, Construction and Planning, I take away an understanding of joints and assemblies, materials and processes of design. I have learned that every problem can be a design problem and constraints can lead to innovation. I have also had the opportunity to teach, first as a graduate teaching assistant and now as a post-graduate student, and look forward to taking these skills with me to a future teaching job or an architecture office.