Grad student designs hit Green

College Green was dotted with makeshift structures yesterday, designed by graduate students to resemble Japanese Tea Houses. "We're building 'tea-shirts'," said Nick Hoffman, second-year architecture graduate student. "They're a portable, wearable place to have tea." The lightweight constructions -- made from materials such as newspapers, canvas and tree branches -- were erected as part of a studio class being taught by a visiting Japanese artist, Kinya Maruyama. "This is only really the beginning, [the project] is going to be going on for the next three and a half weeks," said Anne Spirn, chairperson of the Landscape Architecture Department. "These structures will be appearing at least a couple of more times this spring." "The task was to find a place that their structure fits into the landscape that is a nice place for one or two people to have tea," she said. The students worked individually on the structures, but over the next two weeks they will be "divided into groups of four and they will put their 'tea-shirts' together to make a community of houses," Spirn added. According to Hoffman, a similar project was done last year and many structures found permanent homes at a University-owned farm. The students said they plan to bring their works to the farm after the end of the project. Each "tea-shirt" is unique and represents an individual idea of the student, Spirn said. "We're designing personal tea houses," second-year graduate student Nadia Anderson said. "In mine, the basic idea is about how in the tea ceremony you have a relationship between two people. Mine uses the gaps between the two pieces of material to represent this." Spirn said that Maruyama has taken the students to the Philadelphia Art Museum and Japanese garden to learn more about the Japanese style but that these tea houses are not meant to be copies of that style.

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