In this first year project, students were asked to produce loose sketches as a way to conceptualize more complex designs. Pellino created a simple timeline for each member of an imagined nuclear family, using graphite on paper and collage elements. Pellino started out intending a humorous theme (the cleric, ostensible head of this new-fashioned family, studies nuclear arms), but the final project was far darker. Pellino writes: "Living in New York had exposed me to some rather detached characters who had essentially transformed personal space into money-making space . . . I conceptualized a family unified only through the common goal of money-making, so mesmerized by this process that they were oblivious to the process of decay built into the architecture. Over time and through their own blindness to their environment, the house--detailed to encourage water infiltration and the growth of trees in the masonry--would collapse around them."