This proposal was my Masters of Architecture thesis at Princeton University. I have worked on this proposal for the better part of a year. I have sat in on/listened to nearly every town hall meeting since last August. I have presented this project, started over and reworked it countless times. I wanted to make this proposal as real and as powerful as possible, something that was able to elicit emotion just by looking at it.

I will say that the journey through this project hasn’t been an easy one. I knew from the moment we were given the choice to choose our topic that this was the project I wanted to do and I was told by multiple people, multiple professors, and multiple times along the way that this was going to be an impossible task and that really was all the more reason why I had to do it. We were asked last semester when coming up with our proposal “what’s at stake?” And for me, I had a lot of personal stake in this project.

One of the glowing columns in the proposal is Steve Berger. He visited Vegas to celebrate his 44th birthday. He’s been best friends with my mom's boyfriend Bill since elementary school and they both love country music. They weren’t planning on going to the festival but decided last minute to purchase tickets for the final night from someone selling them on Facebook. My mom and Bill joined Steve that night.

My mom and Bill stayed by Steve's side long after the shooting stopped and the grounds cleared and long after they knew he was gone, until finally first responders told them they had to leave the grounds.

I didn’t hear from her until much later the next day. After waking up to headline after headline of what happened that night and not being able to reach her, the feeling of not knowing cannot be put into words. You never think that there's a possibility it can happen to you or your loved one until it does.

To say this was a difficult project to do would be an understatement but the stake that I had in it made It necessary to push through. My mom has been checking in constantly throughout this process giving me ideas that I could use. Some good, some not so good but I loved hearing how invested she was in it. I showed her the final progress the weekend before my final presentation and it brought her to tears. If that isn’t powerful, I don’t know what is.

Above all I want to thank my mom for being the biggest motivation for completing this proposal and my biggest hope is that I was able to do this project justice for Steve and the rest of the 58 that lost their lives that night.

https://issuu.com/austinmadrigale/docs/workscompendium