Jane Barrett : People [DesignBuildBLUFF]

DesignBuildBLUFF is a program for graduate students to realize architecture that nurtures the spirit and improves the lives of all who experience it.

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Jane Barrett

In Memory

10/24/73 – 1/13/06

At the outset of her graduate school study Jane experienced the design/build program, and she played an enlivened and pivotal role in the completion of the Kunga House.

Immediately and profoundly it seemed to shake awake her attitude about the possibilities for her passion for architecture, most importantly its humanist potential and its heretofore obscured, yet wide-open existence for bushwhacking social responsibility.

After graduation Jane continued in earnest to work for and champion the necessary future of the design/build program, participating in nearly every aspect of its transition to DesignBuildBLUFF and its relocation to the Four Corners region of Utah in order to provide spirit- and culture-enhancing homes for Navajo families exceptionally down on their luck, off-the-grid on the reservation, alternative in every last sense of the word.

Jane embedded herself, invited or otherwise, in the political maneuvering, raising of funds and awareness, grant finding and writing, public relations, graphic presentations, website design – fanning of the fire raging in her own belly for this and all projects of similar ilk, and detail opportunities of every kind.

All the while she managed to inspire innovative thinking amongst the next waves of students on the job site itself, hammering, power-sawing and shoveling alongside them.

It’s more than a wide-gaping hole now left in the DesignBuildBLUFF program; in reality it’s been a blow from a mid-range 12-guage shotgun blast, piercing voids left throughout the whole spectrum, so all-encompassing was Jane’s influence, institutional memory and self-imposed sense of responsibility.

Not least among her uncountable talents was her quite clear understanding of justice and its counterpart, namely the lack thereof. She could provide improbable buoyancy with impeccable timing. Jane Ashley Barrett’s unselfish commitment will be the example to which we at DesignBuildBLUFF will forever aspire.