NEIA Students Travel to Mexico

Brookline, MA – Interior Design students at Brookline’s New England Institute of Art have teamed up once again with Adjunct Professor Deborah Thomas Drew and the village of La Penita de Jaltemba, to design and build a community center on the west coast of Mexico. The difference this time? The students will be living among the folks of this small Mexican village, working hand in hand in the construction and design as their senior internship project starting early 2013.
Students will experience the design and construction of an actual project. They will gain extensive experience working with recycled reclaimed and studies in reusing local building materials. Site and field information will be gathered daily and documented in a daily journal and/or blog with student sketches and photography along with the student’s personal reflection of their experience. In addition, weekly workshops in cultural learning such as Spanish, cooking and local art are also offered. Internet and SKYPE services are provided for students to continue their online course education.
“Even though the actual building of the community center is over a year away, it is now time to buckle down and get serious,” said Drew. “My students have been working on this project for three semesters now and the ideas are piling up – it will be great to see them unleashed.”
“The plan is summer and fall 2012 commercial design students will design for a targeted final site with a specific Program of Needs (PON),” sums up Drew.
The initial design phase of this community center project began in the summer and fall of 2010 with groups of commercial design students working as a team for a specific site. Until a building/site has been selected, this year’s commercial design students are currently working modularly.
Professor Drew assigned a modular system for PON using a 15 x 7.5 meter rectangle. In each module the student is required to design, a lobby, library, physical fitness studio, esthetician school, food service area and child care center. These program components are in addition to last year’s student program design requirements. “Which, by the way, for my last year’s students, are still on record,” winks Drew.
Winter 2013 interior design internship students will travel to Mexico and culminate ideas from previous student work into a single design. Construction on the actual center will follow. Future interns have the opportunity to work on the project until the community center is complete.