Through a partnership with ACE Mentors and HCA Healthcare, we’ve had another successful team of students experience life as a designer and participate in changing their community through design.  We are so grateful to have been able to gift three outstanding students from this year’s class with $3000 scholarships to pursue design careers.

We have enjoyed a long relationship with ACE Mentors, who partners local design firms with high school students interested in pursuing careers in design and construction.  These bright minds work alongside our bright minds; guided through a hypothetical project with veteran industry knowledge and design thought leadership from sponsors.  The goal is to expose future designers and engineers to real-world situations and fuel their passion for the industry. The team covers all the bases– big picture to details.

The initial goal is to get their minds engaged in an overall picture by introducing them to the entire scope of what is required for a project.  By reviewing actual construction documents from a relatively large project of ours, the students were able to cover several disciplines and talk through the steps to get to construction.  Equipped with the full picture, they tackled a design project in their neighborhood, Cornelia Fort Airpark, so the result would impact their local community.

After weeks of site assessments, user group activities, design charettes and even financial analysis, the students came up with the idea of incorporating Glamping, or camping in style, into the Nashville scene. They mapped out the project covering several disciplines:

• Architectural: introducing different sizes of retired airplanes people could rent out to camp in – creating buildings and objects either out of airplanes parts or airplane aesthetics
• Interior Design: working out different themes and interior configurations possible for each fuselage being camped in
• Civil Engineering: looking into how the site works and preventing/lessening the impairments of a potential flood on the site

“Their imaginations’ really fueled the project!” shared Nick DePillo (a TMP sponsor along with Ben Carpenter, Sammi Howard, and Mat Smith), with one idea of using the adjacent wooded park to house “crashed planes“ in the trees for party rentals.  We know our team is ready for some treetop glamping!