Main Gallery - Cheever Hall - Montana State University School of Architecture

Jack Smith

February 2017

Tea House As Trope

The exquisite works in this exhibit were created by Montana State University students in an advanced architecture studio taught by Dr. Jack Smith in spring semester 2013.  The studio explored the roots and history of the traditional Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony and the tea house as a model for contemporary meditation spaces and minimal single family dwellings. 

This exhibit showcases works from each of the three projects in the course.  For the first project, students researched the Chinese and Japanese tea ceremony and its meaning to culture and architecture.  The students then designed and illustrated traditional tea houses and made scale models of their designs.  For the second project, students researched and designed contemporary tea houses and illustrated their projects with drawings and scale models.  The final project was to design a contemporary single-family house for a western culture, using the principles and ideas developed from the first two projects.  The models in all three of the projects had to be at a large enough scale to assure that all the connections, both physical and intellectual, were really made

The following students created the works in the exhibit:  Scott Auperin, Steven Clark, Fu Menting, Tyrell Jacobs, Mark Stelling, Tyler Alexander and Lucas Yatch.