NOMA STUDENT COMPETITION
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Typology: Transit Center
Date: Fall 2018
Model Material: 3D Printed Material, Acrylic, Paper, Wood
Software Used: AutoCad, Illustrator, Photoshop, Rhino, Revit, Vray
I have been a member to NOMA since the fall of 2016. It is a club that promotes diversity in the architecture field, which I am a strong advocate for. This is the first year that NDSU’s NOMA chapter that has ever competed in the student competition that NOMA puts on every fall. This year, the assignment was to create a new transit hub that is mixed use and opens the doors to planned Barack Obama Presidential Library that is a short distance away from our site. This was an intense assignment, only because there was a lot of collaboration between all of the students and the advisers to our club, Doug Hansen and Bakr Aly Ahmed. For the competition, we had to create four boards that followed NOMA’s criteria and an optional model. We wanted to stand out, so we used loud colors for our boards and we even created two models when none were required. When attending the conference, the whole four day excursion was very surreal. The eight of us who went were running all over Chicago trying to move our boards and models from event to event. We would throw our models into Ubers, have our boards get crushed int he doors to the L, and dodging cars as we ran to get to the competition held at the Chicago Architecture Center. We didn’t win the competition unfortunately, but we mainly wanted a taste of what the competition is made of. The students now know what to expect next year when they compete. After the competition, I competed in a competition to get funding for NOMA since next year the NOMA club does not have funding. I competed in JLG’s (a firm located in Fargo) ninety second video competition where you make a film that says why you chose NDSU. We don’t know if we won yet, but I really hope we do.
