Welcome to the CAC.C Studio V blog for the Spring 2011 semester. We are going to follow in the footsteps of Professor David Pastre’s Fall 2010 Studio V and record our design/build process through this blog.
This semester Studio V will focus on one project, a vertical urban garden. We are working with the Charleston Parks Conservancy whose mission is “to increase the quality, awareness, appreciation, and usage of Charleston’s parks and greenspaces.” One of their current initiatives is to create community gardens.
The studio is comprised of eight students: four undergraduate landscape students and four graduate architecture students. I hope this project will build on their distinct strengths and lead to a really great end result. In the vertical garden, we will mix architecture and landscape architecture into a single space – a single form. We will be asking two important questions. What does architecture offer urban gardening, and what does urban gardening offer architecture?
The executive director of the Charleston Parks Conservancy is Jim Martin. Jim has a passion for gardening that is easy to see almost immediately when you meet him. He has a blog called compost in my shoe. Surprisingly, we found out that one of his personal interests is vertical gardening, so this should be a great partnership. I can’t wait to see what we come up with.