"Before this course I didn't know a thing about welding. Now I've learned two different types of welding," said exuberant architecture student Rebecca Southworth as she sawed, sparks flying, at a steel angle iron in the Sculpture Foundry. "A neat experience," agreed fifth-year student Pete Klassen-Landis as his drill bored into a plank of walnut.

Cornell may be known for its world-famous architects, from Richard Meier to Rem Koolhaas. But industrial design? That's for the Rhode Island School of Design and the Pratt Institute.

But in the 2006 academic year, the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) and its director, Milton Curry, associate professor of architecture, launched the university's first industrial design program with 10 undergraduates taking designs beyond conception and sketchpad and actually building something.

Last weekend their efforts went on display in Manhattan's Javits Center as part of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, one of the world's largest furniture trade shows. In a tiny booth measuring just 10 feet by 10 feet by 8 feet high, the Cornell architecture students, under the banner of the CCA Xdesigngroup, presented their ideas to buyers from Milan to Melbourne. Their booth was a setting of curved laminate and wood chairs, of right-angled steel lighting, of a silicone rubber screen, of a walnut storage wall -- of "space frozen in a moment of transformation," as Andrea Simitch, associate professor of architecture, put it.

The idea of the course -- the first in a five-year program -- which Simitch co-curated with professor of sculpture Roberto Bertoia, was to give Cornell students an understanding of what it takes to work as a group and build full scale from the designs they conceive. "They now understand," said Simitch, "how ideas can be located within a particular material and just how long it takes to build something."

Senior Brian Carli, who helped man the booth, enthusiastically agreed. He and two other students, Justine Cheng and Klassen-Landis, worked as a group on a chair made of poplar veneer designed to follow the contours of the back. "Our idea was to make the chair appear as if it has risen from a strip peeling off the floor," he said.

That, said Curry, is the essence of the designed objects: "A process of inscription, from line to plane to multiple planes." In concrete terms, that means a floor pattern made up of two-dimensional birch plywood strips, seeming to sponsor a three-dimensional space.

And what has been learned from the experience? "This makes them better designers by teaching them to manage materials and process and to collaborate on ideas," said Bertoia. And, as Curry noted, in today's design marketplace, which is all about mixing low-tech with high-tech manufacturing processes, knowing how to take an idea from conception to finished product is a big advantage.