Architecture student

Originally from Canon City, Colorado, Caitlin Stevens earned a degree in drafting and design from a community college in Arizona before coming to the University of Arkansas to study architecture. Although she is not from a neighboring state, the School of Architecture offered Caitlin in-state tuition because of her high GPA; she has received three scholarships from the school. Through internships Caitlin has learned 3-d mapping technologies that she has used to map Fayetteville and parts of Ostia Antica, an ancient Roman port city.

Learning new technologies

I support myself, so I have to get a job every summer and on breaks. I was really lucky; Tim de Noble, the head of the department, hooked me up with CAST, which is the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology, and I’ve been working with them on internships since last summer. That was really neat. They work with the EAST initiative, which reaches out to high school students throughout Arkansas, and gets them interested in technology and in some cases architecture. So last summer I got to work with 10 high school kids. We did a 3-d mapping of Fayetteville, for the City of Fayetteville. It ended up on Google Earth, so that was kind of exciting!

Last spring we went out and did some scanning of different parts of Ostia Antica, which was the old port city to Rome, where the Tiber met the ocean. At its height it was about 70,000 people. It’s a huge site, and we did maybe three or four complexes on it so far. I was up in a boom, about 60’ in the air . . . it was really fun, I had a really good bird’s-eye view. It was just incredible, it’s not like a museum where you can’t touch anything – you can touch, and you can walk on the stairs, just like they did hundreds of years ago. So that was very very exciting. I plan to go to Rome for my semester abroad, so it was a good preview just to see what I’m getting into.

Second-year studio

We’re currently working on a project in Kingston, Arkansas, which is about an hour away – it’s nice to have a site that you can visit whenever you want. We’re designing a live/work community for 30 artisans who work in metal, wood and steel. It’s a very large program compared to what we’ve worked with before; it’s a little overwhelming but very exciting.

Time management

It’s just knowing when to say when. To know that you have to go and have a break now, or go and have a good dinner or do something that you might not have time for but your soul needs maybe! Arkansas is a great place to unwind most of the year. Just to go outside and enjoy the fall color or the blooming flowers, and all the water nearby – I really like going out to the lakes. It’s easy to get caught up in studio because that’s where you spend so much time. It’s nice just to take a step back and not talk about studio for a while; that helps.

Strengths of the program

They teach you versatility. They don’t demand that you use one program or another; they lay out some options and let you kind of play with them and decide which works best for you. And I think that once you start to learn one or two computer programs and you learn to be adaptable, that helps you; you can go to any office and learn any computer program without it being scary or being something you’re totally not used to. The size of the class is a plus, because you have a teacher you can speak with one to two times a week about your project if you want to usually. And just the studies abroad: every semester they try to make a trip out of Arkansas, as well as your studies for a semester in Mexico or Europe. Architecture is really a spatial art. It’s not something you can look at pictures always and understand. To be able to go to those places and experience those things I think is essential.