Recently, students in Professor Michael Ermann's fourth-year lab exhibited their work in the Cowgill Lobby.

The prompt for their work was as follows:

"The Blacksburg Community Center (Patrick Henry Drive) will be razed and replaced. A new community center of your design will be built on the old site.

This effort will rest on space, the z-dimension, deep light, depth of façade, the overhead plane, iteration, and a critical questioning of the default decisions you make in your work, including aperture typologies (doors, windows, skylights), reliance on hot forms, pancake stacking, overreliance on program to define form/space/ composition, and two-dimensional thinking. Priorities will be rigor, spatial and sectional quality of interior spaces, and, in the case of the basketball courts, spanning structure."