Modeling a Vision: Design Technology, and Impact celebrates 20 years of the Center for Design Research (CDR) at Virginia Tech. CDR has and continues to create opportunities for student and faculty through integration of teaching and research. It serves as a workplace for collaboration where performance criteria co-mingle with cultural forces, and calculation is challenged by societal precepts producing works of use, surprise, and wonder.

This exhibition highlights CDR projects over the past 20 years, each having increased in complexity and interdisciplinary collaboration. Featured are CDR’s award-winning LUMENHAUS and FutureHAUS. Linking the technical rationality of science and the rich ambiguity of design, each project advances CDR’s goal to cultivate a new type of designer within the challenge and excitement of discovery. 

CDR aspires to C.P. Snow’s commentary regarding the separate trajectories of science and art: “There seems to be no place where the cultures meet — At the heart of thought and creation we are letting some of our best chances go by default. The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures — of two galaxies, so far as that goes — ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the breakthroughs came.”