For most aspiring architects, freshman year in college is an exercise in drudgery. Students are required to bury their noses in textbooks, steep themselves in theory and spend ungodly amounts of time fending off boredom in cavernous lecture halls and studios. If they're lucky, they might get to build a foam mock-up or scale model.

But on a recent Wednesday afternoon, the 100 or so freshmen in the University at Buffalo's architecture program were 50 miles away from their stuffy studios, doing what few of their peers get to do: putting the finishing touches on full-scale versions of structures they had designed and built themselves. The innovative project, dubbed "The Living Wall," is on view in one corner of the sprawling Griffis Sculpture Park in Ashford Hollow. A mixture of interactive public sculpture and teaching tool, the series of 14 structures opened to the public April 25 and will remain up through the end of the park's season in October.

In teams of six or seven, the students designed 14 6-by-6-by-8-foot dwellings, built in pieces on UB's Amherst Campus, transported by truck to the sculpture park and assembled and expanded by the students on-site. Under the rules of the project, each mini-building had to contain three sleeping spaces, an entranceway and a reasonable way to move around while inside.

With such broad rules, students dreamed up a huge array of structures, each wildly different than the next in shape, configuration and ease of use. They sit huddled up against one another on a long stretch of grass, a jagged line of wacky plywood forts rising out of the Cattaraugus County countryside.

Inside one of the structures, a recessed wall of plywood with a horizontal window resembling a gun slit and a 2-foot opening on the ground, the members of team "Rick Roll" clamor to descend from their beds, excited to talk about the idea behind their unorthodox domicile. Just one problem though — the building has no door. Instead, the students must lie down on the ground and roll through the opening on the ground to enter and exit their building — something they are all too eager to do.

"It's kind of a radical rethinking of entry, I guess," said smiling team member Joey Swerdlin, of Lancaster. "There were no real stipulations to what we could or couldn't do, so we just kind of pushed the limit as far as we could."

Directly abuting the "Rick Roll" team's innovative structure is a building dubbed "Naterior." Student Vincent Riberto, of Brooklyn, explained the unusual title.

"We wanted to look for a way of best communicating our building with the park that we're going to be in," said Riberto, who also boasted that his team's structure contained ample sleeping space for five and a large back deck that fits up to eight people. "It's a perfect blend of the interior and the exterior."

The "Naterior" team also included a complex system to divert rainwater into buckets for reuse. Reflecting on the structure, one of the architecture instructors on the construction site, Chris Romano, stood back with a smile on his face. "These are freshmen!" he said, scarcely able to believe the sophistication some of the teams achieved in the eight-week span of the project.

"In most studios, kids don't get the chance to go through all phases of design," said Shadi Nazarian, an architect and UB professor overseeing the project. "It's very difficult to move from the design stage to proposing architectural design. Not only did they go through that, but they had to actually translate it into structures that come apart, they're in modules, they get put back together, they need to be transported someplace and reassembled. So this is truly a comprehensive project."

Other projects include an I-shaped structure that leans forward ("Miss Eileen"), one that mimics the structure of a Japanese fan ("Akomeogi"), one that includes all manner of acute angles ("Acute Group"), and another resembling a dust-buster ("Hoover"). Each building represents the personalities and debates of the team members, some of whom opted for comfort and lots of sleeping space and others of whom eschewed practical considerations in favor of radical design approaches.

Simon Griffis, son of the sculptor and park founder Larry Griffis, was involved in bringing the project to the park and in vetting the designs. He stressed that the structures are meant to be explored by park visitors, and he praised the project for its seamless integration into the Griffis landscape.

"The greatest thing about the sculpture park is that you're allowed to touch all of the artwork and some of it you're allowed to climb in, on and around," Griffis said. "So this is in keeping with what we're all about."

One of the biggest challenges, many students said, was resolving issues of balance. One team, "Akomeogi," went against the advice of teaching assistants, who warned that their structure might be too precarious to stand. But with experimentation, the team members found that it was in fact perfectly balanced. Alex Neubauer, of that team, reflected on his team's building and on how it matched up with his expectations for freshman year.

"It doesn't look anything like what it originally was when I started making it out of foam. But I could turn this thing back into the original form in my head, and it's really cool to see that transformation," he said. "This project definitely threw us into overdrive. Undergraduate students rarely ever get to make anything full-scale. And the opportunity we've been given by UB to let our imaginations run wild and just build what we've been dreaming is amazing."

Watch our video of the Living Wall:

cdabkowski@buffnews.com