MISC-03.2024
In the fall semester of 2022, Mireille Roddier gave a lecture about the importance of community, celebration, and collaboration. This was when we learned about the Beaux-Arts Ball. Emerging from the covid-19 pandemic, the Taubman School of Architecture lacked a sense of belonging and a few of us took interest in changing that. The following summer, Mason Magemeneas, Nicole Planken, Kavya Ramesh, and I started planning and in the spring of 2024 we officially hosted over 300 people for the First Annual Taubman Architecture Ball.
The kickoff event was presented on January 29 with an opening lecture from Mireille Roddier followed by an info session with the planning team. Students were then directed to register as an individual or team for the planning team to then go through and match students to groups, assign budgets, and source materials for projects. Leading up to the ball, the planning team also organized workshops for costume design with Zain AbuSeir, inflatable fabrication with Anca Trandafirescu, and an informal “desk crit” session with a variety of faculty members. In total, 14 large-scale projects were featured at the ball.
To facilitate such a large event without being an official student organization, countless hours were spent emailing various people from the college to prove legitimacy and receive money to put on the ball. Our work included fundraising, payroll, recruitment, managing the website and instagram, marketing, and event planning. Funding came primarily from the Dean’s Office, the Associate Dean for Academic Initiatives, Taubman College Student Affairs, Taubman College DEI, American Institute of Architecture Students, and Architecture Representative Council.
“The Taubman Architecture Ball (T.A.B.) is a large-scale opportunity for students to design and curate an experiential event, featuring workshops held throughout the year and collaborative sessions that culminate in a celebratory ball to showcase the incredible capabilities of the college and student body.
The first annual ball is titled “Frameworks” referencing strong foundations, structural networks, and re-framing the ways in which we build. Through an open call, students will reimagine the value of waste materials, creating innovative design from what would normally be scraps. Our goal is to provide Frameworks for the ball to operate each year, and start a sustainable cycle for future students. This is just the beginning.
In teams, students will collaborate on ideas for installations and later fabricate those designs to showcase at the final event. Workshops will be held for things such as costume design and inflatable fabrication as well as a “desk crit” session with faculty to help develop projects even further. These groups will create human scale installations for the ball that will coalesce at the event to create an immersive, shared, corporeal experience for everyone.”