The smell of sawdust, the sound of a saw, and the sight of people hard at work are words to describe the Columbus North High School architecture studio. Senior Eshaan Mehta spent most of the beginning of the school year of 2020 in this studio preparing Tunnel Vision, an exhibit for Exhibit Columbus.
“Exhibit Columbus is a design exhibition that is based in Columbus where designers around the world are invited to Columbus to basically produce an installation that will go in Downtown Columbus, ” Mehta said.
Exhibit Columbus has been around for years. Each year a high school build team is put together.
“I was given the opportunity to do it through my architecture class. We do one for every exhibit cycle that there is,” Mehta said.
The high school build team is made up of architecture students from different schools such as CSA, Columbus East and Columbus North. They come together to work on an exhibit based on a theme given for the entire event.
“Our theme was the drive from the prompt we were given, which was called New Middles: The future of the middle city. We decided to take that and kind of take a step back from that and look at it from the perspective of the past going forward,” Mehta said.
Senior Miguel Martinez, along with other peers, began in September of 2020 to work on this project.
“In the beginning, it was extremely difficult to try to get a jumpstart into creativity,” Martinez said.
The brainstorming process was difficult but became easier once they came up with their idea. This idea is now known as Tunnel Vision.
“We created a geodesic tunnel with a linear element of a river snaking throughout the tiles that we used to cloud the geodesic tunnel,” Mehta said.
Tunnel Vision creates a walk-through of the past and present of Columbus’s architecture. The tiles each have a different image of a building based on architecturally significant structures in Columbus dating from 1864 to the present.
“I think that it helps us engage with the community. All of these designers are coming to our community because they see something special in it,” Mehta said.
This event creates a sense of unity for different designers as well as the community itself. Sophomore Grishma Pitkar explains why she thinks Exhibit Columbus is important. “It educates people about the importance of architecture,” Pitkar said.
Exhibit Columbus shows the importance of architecture, while also involving the community.
“In another two years we’ll do this all over again and it’ll be a completely different thing,” Mehta said.