How can I incorporate the program into the given site?

• 2 concepts found within both program and preexisting site

1. Growth

Site: The landscape is experiencing growth and change over time

Program: Growing food, children’s growth

2. Mobility

Site: Temporal elements – sun’s movement

Program: Bike shop, circulation

• Mobility is expressed horizontally in the bike test track
• Growth is expressed vertically because the spaces of growth are stacked upon one another vertically
• Contrast/balance created by the verticality and horizontality

Critique for Meg in interim review 11/9

• Confusion because landscape and building are supposed to “weave” but are two separate removable pieces
  • Combine/weave modeled landscape and weaving
• “Cut and fill”
• • Great start – strong central idea
  • Further develop
  • Cut and fill into the earth
• Begin to imitate the landscape within the building
• Explore temporal elements
• Create more “in/out/below” moments
• • Could the whole building be below the ground?
  • Could physical masses be protruding from the building?
  • Could two floors be below the ground?
• Build upon water analysis
  • Explain how water is going to move into the building
  • Put water studies on watercolor paper

How can I successfully incorporate the program within the given site?

What initial reactions does the site evoke?

How can I transform the volumes created in my knot hybrid model into spaces within the children’s discovery center?

My project design is primarily about growth and mobility. The program is about creating a space where elderly and youth can come together to learn about maintaining a sustainable lifestyle involving both food and activity. The primary spaces within the design are the garden, a space to grow and recycle food, the kitchen, a space to prepare food, and the bike shop, a space where individuals can rent, build, and repair bikes.

Not only will the occupants literally learn to grow food and experience bike mobility, but the design facilitates growth and mobility in youth by having the elderly provide their example.  The space facilitates mentoring and the understanding of generational differences.

Growth is spatially reflected in my design through its verticality, and mobility is reflected through horizontality. The design contains a paved path where bikers can test ride their bikes – which creates a horizontal space of back and forth mobility. However, the spaces of growth are stacked vertically on top of one another. The garden is at the base of the site, the kitchen on the first level of the building, and a rooftop greenhouse. Growth and mobility represented horizontally and vertically both create contrast while simultaneously balancing the design.

The ideas of both growth and mobility necessitate laboratory spaces for testing. The kitchen becomes a space for testing healthy eating using the food grown in the demonstration gardens. The paved bike path becomes a test track for bikes constructed in the shop.  The event spaces and seminar classrooms become spaces to mediate between growth and mobility.

Because my design is centered upon growth and mobility, it became important to create overlap between landscape and structure. The greenhouse becomes a structure within the landscape, and a rooftop garden creates landscape atop a structure. Growth not only takes place outside in the demonstration gardens but also on top of the building as well. Mobility is not only exemplified by circulation within the interior of the building but on the bike test track in the garden.

Continuously revise your project statement to refine the essential concepts that answers the question:

What is your project about?

This will be your “elevator pitch”, the first words that you speak when introducing your project for any crit or review. Do not short circuit the process by talking about morphological aspects of the project and architectural strategies that you want to pursue. Instead talk about your interpretation of the site and program that lead you to making analogical associations. Visualize in words the attitude, character, and identity of your project.

The Links page of wp-admin is a place for you to add academic/professional links to websites that will appear in your blog sidebar as a blog roll organized into the categories, Architecture and Studio.  Studio is reserved for links to colleague sites within the studio blogging network, however, you can add additional links to Architecture and create other categories within the blogging guidelines.

There are at least two ways to draft/save/publish a post to your blog site.  You can access all of the “Tumblog” post types through the Dashboard of the wordpress admin area, which include a Standard post type called Article as well as Image, Link, Audio, Video, and Quote.  You can also navigate to Posts | Add New to start a new Post item, and select Format, Categories, and Post Tags.  iPhone and iPod Touch users can use an app called Express described here to upload posts including photographs to their blog site, which has been enabled for this type of connectivity.  Note that you can start and save a post as a draft and choose to publish at a later time.

Gravatar stands for “globally recognized avatar” administered here.  Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. You should register a “G-rated image” of yourself using the email address you will use to administer your blog.

Your blog comes pre-loaded with widgets in the sidebar of your page layout.  One of the widgets requires some editing to reflect your (academic/future-professional) personality.  In the wordpress admin site of your blog, go to the Appearance tab, and then Widgets.  Look for the Blog Page Template, Primary widget menu and the Blog Author Info widget.  Add your name, edit the bio information, and if you have registered your email at Gravatar, then add the appropriate email address.