Rice architecture team on a Swiss roll

Will represent North America in forum on Lausanne Hotel School expansion

Two students, an alumna and a professor from the Rice School of Architecture (RSA) will be guests of the Lausanne Hotel School in Switzerland for a week this summer, but it will be no vacation.

The RSA representatives are the only North Americans invited to take part in a forum of international architecture students to suggest paths for growth at the oldest hospitality school in the world, founded in 1893.

A team from the Rice School of Architecture is making plans for the Lausanne Hotel School. From left, Professor Carlos Jiménez, Vy Drouin-Le, Tucker Douglas and Reiko Wei.

Professor Carlos Jiménez, recent graduate Reiko Wei and graduate students Vy Drouin-Le and Tucker Douglas are on a tight deadline to produce a proposal for the school’s expansion. They will compete for attention at the event in early July with students from nine other architecture schools from Argentina, Chile, India, Portugal, South Korea, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland.

The Swiss school is world-renowned for teaching hotel management, Jiménez said, but it’s running out of room. The student teams were asked to design a new campus addition with 650 student housing units, a teaching hotel and other components for the campus in a remote Alpine valley a half-hour commute from Lausanne.

“They really don’t know how they are going to develop,” Jiménez said of the school. “They want to get insight from students of architecture who are almost at the level of their own students, and who are closer to the tempo of things in terms of what students are thinking about.”

The Rice students will have the opportunity to present their models and plans as though they were an architecture firm competing for the job — which they might be. If the judges like what they see, they will incorporate the students’ ideas into their master plan and may even hire someone from the “winning” team to work on the project.

That certainly appeals to Wei, who put off her job search to join the team’s intensive effort, which has financial backing from RSA. “I think they want to start building in 2014, so there’s some urgency,” she said.

Drouin-Le was in Europe and visited the school after an acquaintance of Jiménez, architect Francisco Mangado, invited Rice to participate last November. “What I saw, and what the students say, is that all the activity is concentrated in one very crowded building,” she said. “They have common spaces in the dorms, but they’re unpleasant to be in.” She said students were seeking room to spread out work in the cafeteria and even in coat-check rooms.

“They intend to establish a community as much as an identity,” Jiménez said. “Now, they have a scattered set of buildings that have grown through the years without much vision. So the project is also about giving a more cohesive fabric to the campus.”

The students came together in April as an independent team and will work long, intense hours until their departure to complete their plans.

“This is a unique opportunity,” Jiménez said of the real-world experience. “The students get to play on a world stage and present to clients, architects and experts. It’s not simply a student competition. This is how architects go after projects.”