Last week, I went to hear Noah Demarest give a short presentation on some of his past and present architecture projects with the company he started: STREAM Collaborative. It was neat to learn about some of the renovations and new buildings around college town. For instance, he showed us a couple images of a new apartment being built near college town and spoke about a few challenges he and his company faced when planning for it. It turns out that there is a five-story limit in that area, but they were able to make the most out of the purchased land by  building one floor partially underground and lofting some areas of the top level. Also it had never really occurred to me, but college town is filled with a massive number of power lines crisscrossed in the air. This causes a problem for some architecture projects, which need to be more than 10 feet away from them. The city wants to bury the lines, but that is an expensive process and seems to be a project not in the foreseeable future.

In all of the projects that Mr. Demarest showed us, I was amazed by the preview images generated. Some of them looked like photographs taken in real time, even though the projects had obviously not been completed yet! Mr. Demarest said that he and his company pride themselves on creating images of end products which they can actually deliver. A good example of this was the image of the planned renovations to the Cornell tennis facility. It looked very nice, modern, and exactly as I could imagine it looking in real life. Their planned design for the new GreenStar market looks awesome as well. Overall, I really enjoyed the presentation and was very impressed by STREAM Collaborative’s designs!