In the 1980s, Pellino writes, "artists and designers were exploring kitsch as a way to infuse humor into their work as well as to force a kind of freshness into design," which they felt tended toward the polite and staid. Pellino followed suit in this first year project, using a Roman Catholic icon in a transgressive fashion as the façade of a tacky souvenir store on Sixth Avenue. Pellino's project was poorly received by his instructor, who Pellino believed "was not ready to give up on good taste just then."

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."