Lunch bags are a common sight across the Texas A&M University campus, but last September, College of Architecture students found them in an unusual place — on top of their classmates' heads.

Literally thousands of white paper lunch bags were twisted, folded and transformed into creative hats as part of a fun-filled design studio competition dubbed "Headcase." The weeklong project, involving architecture, landscape architecture and visualization studios, culminated with a hat parade through the Langford Architecture Center. The parade was followed by a review on Langford's "front lawn," the grass-covered expanse immediately south of Building A.

The competition is the brainchild of Jill Mulholland, a doctoral student in architecture, who found inspiration for the project in a Smithsonian Magazine story about the intricate hat designs of the Hawaii artist Moses. Over a 10-year period, Moses crafted more than 250 distinctive hats from brown paper bags. The hats are now a part of the permanent collection at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, Calif.

"Moses' hats are imaginative, amusing, whimsical and timeless sculptural forms," said Mulholland, who also teaches a lighting design studio at the college. Some are complexly ornate, utilizing literally hundreds of bags, while others, she said, are quite simple though cleverly folded. They all have interesting names like "Sun Rook," "Anthurium," "Gothic Knight," "Beethoven" and "Dahling."

Students from the 10 participating design studios spent their first week of class transforming more than 10,000 white paper lunch sacks and a few gallons of glue into their own hat designs.

The contest rules were quite simple, Mulholland said. The hats had to utilize a minimum of 50 bags each, and had to fit on top of the designer's head. Furthermore, all of the work on the project was to be done in the design studio exclusively with the materials provided; namely paper sacks and glue purchased with funds donated by college faculty, staff and administrators.

Among the results were a highly detailed Chinese dragon, Japanese samurai armor, an elephant’s head, a powdered wig, wildly inventive abstract designs and several unconventional designs including a grocery basket.

Mulholland, who has studied design studio cultures at all of the architecture schools in Texas, said the idea for staging the "Headcase" contest arose from her research.

The state's most innovative architecture studios, she found, share four unique elements: they are extremely fast paced; the students are highly competitive; most of the students' work is completed in the studio rather than at home, and the studios often tackle non-architecture based design projects.

The "Headcase" competition has all of these elements plus, she said, "It was real hard for the participating students not to have fun."