Art, engineering join in outdoor exhibit

In August 2004, just two days before he would leave Madison to pursue his dream — a master’s degree in architecture — University of Wisconsin–Madison civil and environmental engineering student Steve Preston learned he had cancer.

Not only did the diagnosis — Hodgkin’s lymphoma — re-route his educational path, it also changed how Preston approaches each day. “I would go to bed at night, and I would just cling to the hope that I’d wake up the next morning,” he says. “It was that bad. You don’t realize how precious life is, or how much you really need to get done, until you’re actually staring down that path.”

A 1999 Pewaukee High School graduate, Preston views that path — his memories, his experiences and his future — as a series of portals. “Joining all of those portals, you can create a new place to go to, and conversely, you have a place where you’ve been,” says Preston, who began cancer treatments at UW Hospital and enrolled as a master’s student in civil and environmental engineering.

Preston will bring his portals to life in a series of massive paper-tube arches for his outdoor exhibit, “Portals to an Architecture,” May 1-14 on the College of Engineering campus.

“You have to do what makes you happy,” he says. “And you have to do things that you want to do. Something that I’ve always wanted to do is make a sculpture and have it be visible and have it mean something.”

He and several engineering undergraduates are constructing “Portals” this week on Engineering Mall.