Students from Carleton’s Azrieli School of Architecture displayed their talents Oct. 8, showcasing the program’s latest academic group project: nine dining pavilions on the bank of the Rideau River.

The third-year project required students to design and build a pavilion, which they used to serve meals to their professors and guests.

Lucie Fontein, a Carleton architecture professor, said the scale of the project required students to think about attaching different materials, constructing the pavilion, and interacting with their guests.

“We like the students to have an opportunity to design and build at full-scale relatively early in the program,” Fontein said.  “This experience lends an entirely different understanding to the issues involved in an architectural project.”

Third-year student Shaun Coombes said, “This hands-on experience was very beneficial to our overall learning experience.” He also said the project helped “develop our teamwork, planning and craft skills.”

Comparing the project to paid architectural work, Fontein said the project is “similar in that there is a real site, real budget and real construction issues to deal with.”

However the project is “different in that the client is also the user,” Fontein said.

The river may seem an odd location for an academic project, but Coombes noted that his group’s inspiration came from the flora and fauna on site.

While the pavilions used to be stretched along the river, this year they are located behind the greenhouses to create a “sense of community,” Fontein said.

Coombes said it “gave us the opportunity to carry our concepts from the drawing board to physical full-scale construction.”

The project helps students learn “the difference between designing on paper, where things line up and everything is controlled by the author, and real life construction, where surprises happen,” Fontein said.

While Fontein said the pavilions were primarily an exercise for the architecture students and only designed to function for a few hours, they made use of the time to serve up food and insight into architecture.