Lola Boudreau ’26: NADAAA

I grew up surrounded by design, from color palettes to house blueprints. My mom was an interior designer and used to bring me along to each project, so the field of design was nothing new to me. As I got slightly older, however, I became interested in something slightly different: architecture. From house museums to art deco tours, I loved it all: the way you could design a place to make someone want to stay longer or walk right on by. Architecture uses math and art to make a space feel a certain way. And from a young age, I declared to my parents that I was going to be an architect. The only problem was that I didn’t know one thing about what being an architect was like. That changed this summer, when I had the opportunity to intern at NADAAA, an architectural firm that worked on projects from the research and design building at Beaver Country Day to renovating the ceiling at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Me, using Rhino, a CAD software program

At NADAAA, I learned basic skills like making physical models and transferring data, but the most important thing I learned was the software program Rhino. Rhino (short for Rhinoceros 3D) is a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software program that modern-day architects use to model their proposed buildings and renovations. A majority of my time at NADAAA was spent getting to learn how Rhino works through the modeling of both a croissant and then Boston’s Old West Church. Architects sometimes use food as case studies for complex curves and surface mapping, so I was first tasked with drawing out the wire frame of a croissant, based on the famous architectural work To Measure a Croissant by Enric Miralles.

The famous architectural work To Measure a Croissant, by Enric Miralles

This soon became a full-blown project when I transitioned to 3D and positioned the wire frame correctly. Then, I made arches between the wireframe for the computer to connect them digitally, to then make the croissant come to life.

My modeled croissant

From what I learned about building a croissant in Rhino, I quickly got upgraded to modeling Old West Church. This building is of importance because NADAAA had been tasked with renovating the Otis House in Boston, a historic Federal-style mansion designed by Charles Bulfinch and built in 1796, which is now a museum. Old West Church is a prominent feature, which can be seen from the windows of the Otis House, and the architects wanted to make sure they had the views of the church modeled correctly. Because there were no existing models of the church, I had to model it from scratch. So, using a photo of the building, I started with the modeling of the massing, the basic shapes that make up the building.

Massing of the building with reference image and some details done

Then I went on to the prominent details, such as the outings and the columns that lined the building. Thankfully, for details such as these, there’s a tool called Sweep, where you can draw the outline of a two-dimensional detail and then it turns it into a three-dimensional shape. Copying these details around the building, the church began to form.

Close-up of details on building

Next, to get the dimensions right, I was given a point cloud downloaded from Google Earth to align the building correctly. A point cloud is a big collection of three-dimensional points that represent the surface of an object, and this allows Rhino to see the object's, in this case, the church's true size, scale, and orientation.  

Images showing my model building against the point cloud

After aligning the building with the point cloud, I downloaded brick and copper designs onto their designated parts. Now I had a full-fledged building modeled in Rhino.

Images of model Old West Church Final image of church placed into Otis house model

This summer, I learned a lot about what an architect does by creating models myself. The first thing I learned was determination, as my entire model deleted itself at one point, and other times, I had to redo certain details several times for accuracy.  I also learned precision, as there is a rewarding feeling when you figure out how to get a certain detail right or when you understand new codes in the software. These are some of the reasons I ended up loving my time at NADAAA so much. I want to thank Mr. Chang for hosting me and for all my coworkers helping me out whenever I needed it. I would also like to thank Mr. Schlenker for running this program and giving me the chance to work at NADAAA.