Evangeline Soileau ’17 completed her capstone in architecture titled “Dinner Parti” under her advisor, Professor Amber Bartosh

Evangeline was interested in investigating the architectural relationships between events and spatial production via the lens of social dining. The way a space is designed—its materials, structure, and technology, in relation to rapidly changing cultural transformations—affect the functionality of a space. She used four contemporary dining events as project sites for observation, research, and analysis. The dining events she chose to study were picnic, Thanksgiving, solo meal, and exhibition buffet.

She completed this study by hosting four dinner parties of various scope, the fourth dinner being a large-scale event in which the artifacts from the previous three events were showcased, and which identified the social hearth of food in context with the architecture of each event.

Evangeline’s advice for students beginning to think about their capstone:

Start thinking about what you’re intellectually fascinated by within your discipline, and max out your schedule with classes that interest you, or ones that you’re unfamiliar with. You never know what may accidentally inspire you, and every academic experience can be considered a learning one. Meanwhile, start writing, because it’s a way to make these floating, ephemeral, vague ‘interests’ into something more concrete.

The photo is from Evangeline’s first event, a picnic with some friends in Thornden park.