Syracuse University's Adrienn Virag on a Body of Research, Context, and Designing for Experiences
By Julia Gamolina
Adrienn Virag is a Korean-Hungarian architecture student, currently in her second year at Syracuse University. Having been raised in both Canada and Hungary, diverse Toronto and magical Budapest form the rich background from which she examines the world around her. Her interest in the psychological impact of the built environment has inspired an interest in phenomenology and in the ways in which architecture is bound up with emotion and identity. At Syracuse, she is president of the Food Recovery Network, which organizes food donations to neighborhoods in need. She is also an undergraduate research fellow at the SOURCE at Syracuse University, working on a project dedicated to creating opportunities for design students to engage with the local community.
JG: Why did you decide to study architecture?
AV: I decided to study architecture in November of my senior year. I have always loved art and enjoyed hands-on creative work, like fixing old bikes and redoing parts of my family’s house. I am very close to my father, a mathematician and a great thinker, and we used to often walk around Toronto and talk about buildings and new developments around the city. Toronto has grown immensely in recent years, so we have an interesting combination of narrow residential streets and wide avenues, small old buildings, and soaring skyscrapers. What I like most about the city is its great diversity and concentrated core, filled with ethnic villages all within walking distance of my home.
Thinking about space has always been intuitive for me. However, back in high school, when I was deciding on my profession, the question I asked myself was, what could I do that could bring about the most good for other people? My first thought was to go to medical school and become a surgeon. My mother played the primary role in convincing me of the good that I could achieve through art. She has been incredibly supportive of my projects and helped me to realize that I could make the greatest contribution by doing what I am most passionate about and skilled at. So, after submitting pre-med and biology applications to universities in Canada, I threw together a portfolio at the last minute and applied to Syracuse. I was elated when they accepted me!
What are some of the initiatives you’ve focused on in school, and why?
Wherever you are, whatever you do, it is vital to understand the context in which you find yourself. Arriving in Syracuse, one of the first things I did was to explore the city on my bike. I was shocked to discover how separate the university was from the rest of the city. It was a jarring transition from the landscaped campus on the hill to the suburban neighborhoods filled with leaning vacant houses and the empty downtown. Inspired by my explorations of the city, I learned about the history of the rust-belt and their beautiful disinvested cores, and the economic effect of the large institutions that had settled there. Eventually I grew fascinated with the ways in which universities engage with their host cities, and last year, I received an undergraduate grant to study exactly this, and to come up with ways in which design students can engage with the local community and small businesses.
Syracuse University made a great effort in the 2000s to get students downtown, including renovating a warehouse to which they relocated the visual arts program. There was also an ambitious project, the Connective Corridor, which created a landscaped path covering the distance between campus and the city. However, I learned from conducting many interviews with locals and students that this path has been forgotten, and most students still aren’t comfortable walking or taking the bus into the city from campus. My research focuses on why this is the case, and how we can rethink University-City partnerships. Currently I am running a student competition to redesign the visuals for the central campus bus stop. The final design will reference the Connective Corridor and will include an illustrated map of the city with the goal of getting students to walk around downtown, get to know their context, and engage with businesses.
The other major initiative that I have been involved in is running the Food Recovery Network. After a semester of working in a dining hall and seeing piles of untouched food go to waste, I decided to join the campus Food Recovery Network. Together with my coworker, Shallythaw Da, I organized volunteers to help deliver unserved food to local shelters. In one semester we were able to recover seven tons of food, resulting in around 13, 000 meals of hot food. I became president this year, and with a great leadership team and many volunteers we are able to support a budding food pantry that serves families at the end of the day.
“Wherever you are, whatever you do, it is vital to understand the context in which you find yourself.”
What was the favorite project you worked on in school? Favorite paper you wrote? Favorite extracurricular?
“Walls for Vacancy”, a project that I completed in partnership with Yicheng (Alan) Wang, changed architecture for me last semester. This project, sited in Syracuse, incorporated much of my research on the city and my feelings about vacancy. Until then, I had no Idea that beginning with emotion was an acceptable way to design. My professor, Taiwei Wang, had us notice, from the very beginning, how the site made us feel. He also taught me the importance of building a body of research and of thinking before doing any designing. Through this project, I worked through materiality, human scale, and atmosphere. Walls for Vacancy changed the way I think about creativity; good ideas are not found in a vacuum of originality, but arise as responses to well-understood problems.
When searching for internships and jobs, what are you looking for?
I’m looking for a firm that focuses on a human-centered approach with great details. I look for practices that are in touch with the environment and cultural contexts they are working in, at an intimate level. Less masterplanning, and more walking around!
What’s important to you? What inspires you?
Living fully, with a balance of learning and doing. In school, among the late nights and detail drawings, it’s easy to forget that our job as architects is to understand what makes us human. This is one of the most challenging questions that confront us, and requires a lot of living to begin to answer. I’m inspired by people who follow their passions, and are free like children. Those who can live intuitively, whose actions are meaningful because they come from dreams and desire, always radiate. I have met many people like this and they all inspire me tremendously: my parents, many teachers, and many friends.
What do you hope to do in your career?
Growing up in Hungary gave me a completely different way of thinking about scale. Budapest, compared to the North American cities I’ve visited, is designed with the pedestrian in mind. Everything is smaller and more material. Roads are narrower, streets are still paved with cobblestones, supermarkets are neighborhood-sized, and most buildings have a great personality that works within the context. The effect is so strong that even with a population of 2 million, the city feels intimate.
Wherever I work, in or out of architecture, I hope to be able to create a strong sense of place. This is one of architecture’s greatest powers in today's fragmented world. We are constantly bombarded by information that disperses our attention and prevents us from engaging fully. Just being a student means we are exposed to new stimuli and overwhelmed with the need
to manage different tasks. Phones changed our relationship to space, allowing us at any moment to hop from the actual world into a virtual one. The globalization of architectural practice and style has led to placelessness in so many cities. This forces us to protect ourselves and our time by refusing to immerse ourselves in things. But amidst all of this, architecture has the power to ground us, to tell a powerful story about our context, to give us a base for recovering our identity.
“I’m looking for a firm that focuses on a human-centered approach with great details...Less masterplanning, and more walking around!”
Who do you look up to? Both in terms of women in architecture, and in general.
Anne Lacaton from Lacaton and Vassal is one of my great inspirations. Her focus on human well-being and the reuse of buildings is incredibly refreshing in a time when there is so
much new construction. It’s incredible to see how their solutions are made more beautiful by the simple agenda of making everyday life better.
Another great inspiration to me is Ray Eames. Her warm sensibility seeped into everything she touched. Her playfulness and wild creativity was the backbone of the Eames practice, and is a kind of thinking that I would love to see more of in architecture today.
My Hungarian grandmother, Ildiko, is one of the strongest women I know. She was at the core of the greatest place of my childhood, my grandparents’ home. It was a large whitewashed house in the outskirts of Budapest with a great backyard. The layout was strange, with a staircase and loft wrapping around a central atrium that dropped down from the first floor. It was in this space that my grandmother gathered our huge Hungarian family many times a year. My thirteen cousins and I would play all day long in the garden, coming back only for her cooking and witty stories in the evening. Her ability to create such an inviting, adventure-filled space in the house still seems like magic to me.
What advice would you give to those in high school now, choosing their field of study?
Experience as much as you can, as deeply as possible. Connect intensely with your friends, think as much as you can about what you are learning, choose your direction based on what fascinates you. And don’t forget to play!