Like a great novel or masterpiece sculpture, students can spend years crafting their thesis. Despite all the laborious hours and unique ideas crammed into these complex artifacts, most of them are destined for a dusty bookshelf or dark corner. However, Design Observer and Blurb are offering to change that.
Self-published books are a powerful force in architecture, helping to save historic buildings or find employment, but it’s easy to think that only comes after graduation. Design Observer founding editor Jessica Helfand describes design student’s final thesis projects as an “incredible moment that we want to capture: that moment when the culmination of study results in a three-dimensional document, a compendium of language and image, of thought and deed — these students are consolidating their ideas and staking new ground as they do so.”
All images Ryan Tyler Martinez’s MArch Thesis, titled Breadcrumb_Complexity and Curation, Intricacy and the individual. Courtesy Design Observer and Super // Architects.
Open to all theses produced from January 2012 and June 2015 in BA/BFA and MA/MFA programs, the competition requires entrants to submit a Blurb-generated PDF of their portfolio to a link on their microsite. Currently under construction, entrants should look for a submission page appearing this month.
Once the competition closes on June 20th, the seven members of the international jury will select five projects from each of two categories, Bachelors and Masters theses. In a final round, one winner will be selected from each category and subsequently linked, promoted, and discussed on both Blurb and Design Observer.
What’s the jury looking for in a winning project? “The thing that is most critical, for us,” says Helfand, “is the idea of the originality of the ideas and the degree to which they are made visually manifest in some form commensurate with the content.” Even those works not selected in the final rounds will be available as PDFs on the website, making these culminating works available to the world, thereby saving them from the dusty bookshelf for a time.
