1995 Bachelor of Architecture
Kevin Le

Fellow Experience

July 24, 1996

After Mark [Mark McGlothlin, another 1995 fellowship winner from Kansas State] and I were selected to compete for the fellowship, we really didn’t get much advice on making our portfolios. I did get the phone number of an earlier winner, Annie Chu [1989 competition] who told me about the interviews, but on the portfolio I was pretty much on my own.

I approached the portfolio like I would the design of a building. I wanted to construct it like a building with space, light, and shadow. I had already explored the idea of using transparent and translucent sheets in a project I had done that involved programming for a butterfly conservatory. For this project I had covered some translucent rice paper sheets with Plexiglas. I liked how that worked. For my SOM Foundation portfolio I used three layers of Plexiglas. I predrilled these at the corners so that I could eventually bolt them together. Between the sheets I assembled a bunch of different things, various transparencies, Zipatones, and sticky-backs, things I bought at Kinko’s, at design shops, wherever I could find things with interesting texture qualities. I was concerned a little bit with smudging, and static electricity was a problem. I guess the worst problem potentially was fingerprints. Because the sheets had a clear finish and the effect depended on transparency, I was afraid that when the sheets were passed around, they would smudge.