Temple University

February 9th 2007

    … Daria was a bright spot in so many ways. She was happy and full of life, pretty and always smiling. She was a pleasure to have a class. Her knowledge was broad and worldly. Her insights were always worthwhile. She was always ready to shave her thoughts and offer suggestions to her fellow students. A know so many of her friends miss her very much.
    We will always remember her and her smiling face.

Kate Wingert Playdon
Associate Professor Temple Architecture

February 9th 2007

    … Daria was a special young woman who passed through this world much too quickly. I knew her as an architecture student who came to me for academic advice. I retain an image of her standing before my desk imbedded in my memory. Her beauty and intelligence were gifts that she used wisely.

Laurie Duffy
Director of Academic Services

February 9th 2007

    Daria was a wonderful girl. I had her in studio for her spring semester of her first year and I was impressed with her talents, abilities, attitude and work. She was so smart and I was shocked to find out that she was two years younger than the other students. She ran circles around students two years older than her, and made it look easy. I remember when I asked a particularly tricky studio question, I would often turn to her because I knew she would answer. She had a way of having the answer without making anyone feel that they should have known the answer already. Daria was sweet and smart and funny and we miss her very much here. She was a joy in the classroom and fun to talk to outside of the classroom. Her talents and personality will be long remembered…

        Recommendation for Daria Chentsova

    Daria is a gifted designer. She has the ability to conceive and develop complex form and her work in my studio was among the best first year work I have seen at Temple. Daria has the ability to think in the media that she is working in, and she is able to conceptualize a complex issue within her project. I was impressed with the studious attitude with which she churned out her models, and at the same time her attention to the details of each one was extremely gratifying to witness.
    Daria sometimes limits herself and takes the safe answer in her work. She should be dissuaded from this, as she has the potential to be one of the best designers in her class. Daria’s work was consistent and high in quality. She understands the digital media as well as the physical media and I was impressed on more than one occasion with the elegance of her ideas and conceptualizations. Gifted in terms of her use of composition and materials. Her ability to manipulate form is also extremely strong. She has the ability and tenacity to set goals, and attain those goals. I would encourage her to spend more time exposing herself to the works of both architects and artists. I highly recommend Daria for admittance to the program, she has the potential to be a design leader in her class.

D.S. Nicholas
Lecturer

Recommendation for Daria Chentsova

    Daria is a natural artist, has a wonderfully lyrical sense of style and grace in everything she creates and made an immediate and compelling impression in her work for the first project – a design intended to be more a summary expression of the goals of Basic Design than anything overtly architectural. Her ability to freehand draw, to abstractly interpred in charcoal drawings and curved paper bas reliefs, to investigate spatially through digital media, and to draft plans and sections produced a body of work that was wonderfully unified and superbly expressed. The great challenge facing her in the subsequent weeks of the fall semester was to maintain her artistic control and her aesthetic vision while confronting the realities of designing with given programs, specific uses, specified materials and technologies, and rigorous environmental conditions. She is very hardworking, very rigorous and very talented person and – by and large – succeeded in striking the necessary balance. Her work is always handsome, beautiful, unusually compelling, richly conceived, and yet she works hard to respond to practicalities. She does not always succeed in finding the balance point: sometimes the artistry is messy, sometimes the structural framing just does not work, sometimes the program is awkwardly arranged, but that is because Daria does not back down from her intricate and exciting images to settle for designs that are simpler but more prosaic. She struggles, and frequently runs out of time.

    All of this I applaud, because I consider her to be an outstanding student with a serious future in architectural design – even if, at this point, she is only doing B level work. She is imaginative and challenging, skilled in many media, serious and hardworking, strong in her initial conceptions but always easy to talk to, open to commentary and critique. She has a good sense of her own identity, a good sense of process, and the strength and commitment to succeed in her goals. I fully expect her to mature in her efforts and, with her rich sense of space and multiple communication skills, become one of the great talents of the thesis class.

John James Pron
Professor