Learning to lie is worth three credit hours for some architecture students.
Yesterday 3,000 plastic-transparent cups filled with water were spread throughout Knowlton Hall in an installation designed to draw awareness to tsunami victims and pay homage to world renowned Austrian architect Wolf Prix.
However, the details of how the group were able to continue the ruse can be traced back to a quote from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club.” “The first rule of fight club is, you don’t talk about fight club.”
While quoting this, Mark Supelak, a graduate student in architecture, said he and two fellow graduate students, Allen Beedy and Marc Manack, created a documentary on how they had purposely lied to their professor and fellow students about an installation they were planning to create but did not.
The three, who are taking a graduate seminar that brings in high-profile speakers such as Prix to the campus, had originally planned to create an installation entitled “Yet Another Cloud Idea,” which called for PVC piping to run the height of Knowlton Hall weaving through the open spaces formed by ramps that connect separate floors of the building, Supelak said.
Following a miscalculation during the initial planning of “Yet Another Cloud Idea,” the price of the project rose from $1,200 to $12,000, making it impossible for the students to complete, Supelak said.
Around this time a tsunami crashed onto the shores of southeast Asia and with that natural disaster came the idea for an alternative project.
“It’s funny how this tsunami sort of came and went. I mean 200,000 dead, the single biggest event of yours and my life. We felt sad, we did whatever but it’s sort of (like) life goes on,” Supelak said.
After a conversation with his mother-in-law, a third-grade teacher, about whether her students understood the impact of the tsunami, Supelak said he began to formulate an idea.
“At some point there was like an epiphany, a revaluation and it all came together,” Supelak said. “All the confluence of all these things, the objects, the tsunami, the lets do nothing type of thing. We decided that from that day forward we’d start lying to the teacher.”
And lying is what they did.
The students continued to develop their original project, creating sketches and 3-D models, Supelak said. All the while, the students documented how they were able to fake the project and actually focus on their homage to Prix.
The documentary, which is complemented by the cups of water, is interspersed with music and images, such as Jimi Hendrix and footage of Martin Luther King. The main theme of the documentary chronicles how Knowlton Hall has an excess of designer chairs. The idea was to contrast the excesses at OSU with the tragedy and poverty in areas affected by the tsunami affected areas.
“There are just clusters of empty chairs all over the place,” Supelak said. “We went around and documented those. Then we promptly stole one.”
The group then pretended to sell the chair on eBay for $300. Afterward the students returned the chair and donated $300 out of their own pockets to the American Red Cross, which went along with the project and sent the School of Architecture a thank you card, Supelak said.
“It was sort of a Robin Hood-type gesture and a “Blair Witch” type hoax in that we documented the excesses and we were going to sell that chair and donate that money to the American Red Cross, but in the “Blair Witch” hoax we didn’t actually steal it,” Supelak said.
When asked how he felt about the project Kivi Sotamma, assistant professor in the college of engineering and the students’ professor, said he understood that since the project dealt with a tsunami, telling everyone about their project before it happened would have defeated the purpose. He compared it to the tsunami and how it also struck without warning.
“In this case it was beyond just doing a project – people got the beauty, people got the emotion of it, the spirit of it … It made (people) think again, it reminded them that there are things bigger than what we are doing in this school,” Beedy said.
