Sep 24, 2023

First-year School of Architecture student Lyriel Todd has won third place in the Lyceum Fellowship Competition.

Todd said the studio competition was challenging, revelational, and rewarding. "I was able to take what I learned from the larger site, which I came to very much appreciate, and from those who helped me in my project and create something good and worthwhile with what I was given," she said.

The topic of this year's Lyceum Fellowship competition was Re-forming the Anthropocene: A Center for Regenerative Building authored by Elizabeth Gray and Alan Organschi of Gray Organschi Architecture. Advised by lecturer Bryce Truitt, Todd focused on her studio's Westside Park location including the historic Bellwood quarry site, adjacent to Grove Park and other neighborhoods in need of economic revitalization.

The challenge for all students in the studio was to explore regenerative building proposals that could serve as a model for regional economics and 'maker space' practices.

Todd's project proposal, entitled ‘Ode’, examines the site’s compromised resiliency considering historic local-to-regional exploitation of natural resources, human labor, and practices of extraction and demolishment relative to Bellwood quarry and Atlanta public housing.

“In light of destructive and covert processes engrained in the site’s lifespan, the regenerative strategy aims to open the closed shell of the west building to allow materials and processes to flow freely through a field of natural and cultural conditions, expanding the building into the landscape and vice versa through bracketing of natural stone and living wall," Todd said. 

"Administrative and learning space are raised to overlook the building’s processes; hostile space is displaced into the protective cliffside, leaving the ground plane open to free motion. Rebar, concrete, and cladding materials are recovered from deconstructive process of the western wall to be reused with biodegradable elements of wood and burlap. Thereby opening a central relay for the regenerative processing of materials whilst freeing circulation of light, air, and life.”