Tech Topics - Winter 2008 - (Page 25)

STUDENT LIFE Architect’s Eyes Catie Newell uses postgraduate fellowship to further her passions for travel, photography and weather studies. CATIE NEWELL Storms Through an By Kimberly Link-Wills C atie Newell is an architect, a photographer and a storm chaser. A prestigious fellowship enabled her to travel the world exploring and further developing her passions and skills for all three. Newell, Arch 03, returned to Georgia Tech in September to deliver the annual President’s Scholar fall lunch address. She herself was a President’s Scholar during her five years as a Tech student. Newell said she was a physics geek and pilot in training who arrived at the Institute to pursue an aerospace engineering degree. “Evidently I wanted to design planes less in the sense of combustion … and more in the way of making them very aesthetic. It’s actually really hard to walk away from something that you’re good at, but it was even harder for me to hold off on something that I was passionate for and was truly calling me,” she said. “Switching from aerospace to architecture, I spent a year living in Paris,” she continued. “That’s where I really became ever so bitten by a travel bug that has not let me be.” Since graduating from Tech, Newell, who went on to earn a master’s degree in architecture at Rice “I hiked through hailstorms. I laughed at horizontal rain. … I felt extreme pain by frozen breezes.” University, has lived in seven cities in five countries. “Perhaps what I liked most about airplanes was they allowed me to go farther, to see more from above … and to appreciate something much more atmospheric,” she said, explaining her appreciation for the atmospheric is “at the heart of my most abstract work.” In 2006, Newell was awarded the first Grand SOM fellowship, sponsored by the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, which allowed her to travel to Scandinavia, Greenland and Iceland to study and photograph weather. “With the atmosphere as my source for design and my desire to travel, I allowed this very tenuous composition in the driving energy of storms to actually become a display of my work,” said Newell, who now is working on publishing a book, displaying her photography in galleries and holding down an architectural job in Boston. “The title of my work for the last two years is ‘Weather Permitting,’” she said. “I hiked through hailstorms. I laughed at horizontal rain. … I felt extreme pain by frozen breezes.” Newell relished “the thrill of just being a storm chaser,” she said. “Somehow I’ve gone from being a hard-core aerospace engineering student to being a very abstract architecture theorist who’d rather walk the world by herself than sit still.” ERIC TURNER Catie Newell, who began her career at Tech as a “hardcore” aerospace engineering student, now travels the world as an architect, photographer and storm chaser. TechTopics | Winter 2008 25

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Tech Topics - Winter 2008 Contents Letters Buzz Around Town Alumni House Rockin’ Good Time State of the Institute The Hill Presidential Search Going Airborne Student Life An Architect’s Eyes Weight Coach Robot Burdell & Friends Ramblin’ Roll Rural Readers Leading Ladies Yellow Jackets Beyond His Years Leading Change Real World

Tech Topics - Winter 2008

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