Starting a new organization isn’t something that everyone looks to do, but for junior Civil Engineering Melissa Mohrenweiser, it was something she knew she could not only do, but excel at. Melissa partnered up with Hannah Schmidt and Harris Mazur, and thus the Global Architecture Brigades were born. Melissa says that Schmitt and Mazur had been talking about global brigades in regards to architecture for some time, but it was during a basketball game that Schmidt and Mohrenweiser started discussing the lack of connection between Civil Engineering and Architecture for undergraduate students. “As a Civil Engineer, I wanted to know more about the process of designing the building itself. As for Hannah, Architecture students are exposed more to the design side of the building, but not as much of what happens after they’re finished designing the building, like the math and management side. We were looking for a way to bring the two of those things together and gain more experience in the field.”
The original goal of the Global Architecture Brigades was to start a chapter at CMU alongside the other Global Brigades organizations (such as Global Medical Brigades), and to participate in the Architecture Brigades’ annual competition to design a health care facility or school. The winning building design from the competition is to be built during a brigade, which usually occurs during students’ Spring Break. However there was no new design competition this year. “That’s when we started working on networking, and got in touch with Nina Baird, an Architecture professor who put us in contact with a project manager for a school being built in Nigeria (a CMU alum!). So right now we’re designing parts of the school and planning a Spring Break trip to Honduras to finish an “in-progress” building.”
Melissa hopes that CMu’s chapter of the Global Architecture Brigades can become a long-term club that will continue to grow after she, Schmitt, and Mazur graduate. As far as actual building goes, “We’d like to design a sustainable building over Spring Break in Offa, Nigeria: it’s important that the building isn’t more of a burden on their society than a benefit. If it breaks, they should be able to fix it using materials that are readily available to them.”
“The project is definitely bigger than just this year, and it’s really great to see how much support we’ve gotten from CMU professors. Hopefully we’ll be doing even bigger things with it in the future!”